| Desperate Housewives Jump The Shark |
I am pinching myself: there is not a single 1 or 2 star review for this series out of 88. How can that be? What have I missed? I really couldn't stand this show (why did I watch it through, you ask? The furtherance of my own marital relations required it).
Seasons 1 and 2 had a real originality and freshness: an unusual combination of romantic farce and dark thriller which made them compulsive viewing. But the formula seems to have been changed for Season 3. In the intervening period I've been treated to some really outstanding television in the shape of Deadwood, The Sopranos and The Wire - so perhaps I'm now seeing all of Desperate Housewives for what it really is, but I don't think it's that. When it started, Desperate Housewives was on that level. This series really seems to be inferior to the first ones.
Firstly, the series-long continuity of plotlines which was a feature of the first two series is gone. As is the morbid undertone, and the genuinely fractious family relationships: now the guignol is played purely for (cheap) laughs. The real brutality is perpetrated by the scriptwriters who seem to have grown ever more panicked as the series progressed: developing characters and plot lines are hacked to death and their bodies carelessly jettisoned nearly every episode. At one point they resort to having almost all the characters assemble at a supermarket to be held up by a gun-wielding homicidal maniac, in so doing conveniently terminating about three (admittedly moribund) plot-lines with one tin of tomatoes.
Characters we know from previous series behave entirely contrary to their established type: hard-man Mike Delfino (admittedly with the excuse of a severe blow to the head) becomes a hopeless and gormless romantic; Edie Britt stops being a shrew; Lynette Sciavo starts being one, and becomes an hysterical witch-hunter, then a cocquette; Andrew Van der Kamp abandons almost his sociopathic tendencies; we are introduced to and then lose, without regard to story or character arc, a series of wooden characters such as Iain Hainsworth (who apparently really is a Brit, despite sounding like Mike Myers' impersonation of one), the wife-of-the-person-having-an-affair-with-the-former-mistress-of-Bree's-new-husband, Orson Hodge's "dead" wife; Orson's mother, Edie's nephew; Edie's estranged son; Tom Sciavo's ex girlfriend and their daughter; even creepy Zach makes a half-hearted return and disappears.
Not a hint of structure; not a hint of direction; just a ghastly assemblance of stupid and irritating plotlines which seem to have been harvested from the Dynasty and Falcon Crest reject bin. You shouldn't expect to get away with this simply by rebranding it as "comedy" - but judging by the average reaction on this site, they did!
It's just too ghastly to countenance. We have bodies in freezers, bodies buried in backyards, bodies in kitchens, bodies in gardens, bodies in supermarkets, bodies coming back from the dead, coming back from comas, going out from comas, at least seven or eight characters in hospital, we have characters falling out of carparks, falling out of windows, falling off ladders, falling off rooves, we have on-again-off-again allegations of insanity, pedophilia, infidelity, spousal homicide and an utter overdose of love triangles and other types of love geometry - tracking who is shagging whom is so hard that you are caused to doubt the very foundation of the space-time continuum of love itself.
And I haven't even got onto the truly exasperating Susan Myer. Perhaps best if I don't, come to think of it.
Olly Buxton |
1 Rating
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