Sunday, May 31, 2015

Why the final season of 'Desperate Housewives' was the absolute worst of the series


As some may know, I'm a big fan of the ABC dramedy/primetime soap Desperate Housewives. I rewatch the series constantly because I love the concept of it all; a soap based off of what happens behind the closed doors of seemingly perfect suburban homes. Creator Marc Cherry stated on many occasions he first got the idea for the series while watching a news report on Andrea Yates with his mother. Yates was an American mother from Texas who was secretly dealing with postpartum psychosis after her pregnancies. In 2001, she snapped and drowned her five children in their bathtub. She wasn't convicted, however; she was deemed insane and sent to a psychiatric hospital. Cherry's version of that became an American mother, Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong), with a beautiful home with a beautiful husband and son unexpectedly committed suicide one day, and so began the saga of Desperate Housewives.

Anyway, for the first time ever, I've rewatched the entire season from the first season to the last season. I've always attempted to avoid the final season when rewatching because, personally, it's the worst of the series. It had become apparent in the seventh season that, story-wise, the show was starting to die. The seasonal mystery was Paul Young's (Mark Moses) return to Wisteria Lane after years in prison, as well as addressing several other plotpoints that had been left unresolved since the first years of the show. Unfinished business, one might call it. It was then confirmed that the eighth season would be its last, and maybe that's what plagued its final season. The seasonal mystery (even though it wasn't even a mystery) was the 4 main housewives covering up a murder. Wacky and out-of-touch with the traditional approach to storytelling, but okay. Then, Bree (Marcia Cross) receives a letter identical to the letter Mary Alice received on the day she shot herself; "I know what you did. It makes me sick. I'm going to tell." So, clearly, the writers were trying to have the housewives face a "desperate" situation much like the one Mary Alice faced, which didn't work. Not at all. The end result was more like having the girls face a situation like the one the teenagers in I Know What You Did Last Summer faced. Then, the secret tears the women apart. They don't speak anymore. Bree becomes depressed, falls off the wagon and contemplates suicide herself in a hotel room, where she talks to Mary Alice's ghost. I'm sorry, what?! She doesn't do it, thank god, but thereafter she sleeps with a string of men and never calls them again. That's right; conservative, Christian, well-kept Bree Van de Kamp becomes a slut. Talk about unrecognizable. Later on in the season, Bree is on trial for the murder and is about to be convicted when longtime neighbor Karen McCluskey (Kathryn Joosten), whose health was whithering, gets on the stand and confesses, knowing full well they wouldn't pursue convicting her given her age and condition. Yeah. Okay. That's...just no.

Not to mention Lynette (Felicity Huffman) and Tom (Doug Savant). The couple that had endured everything from day one had separated and were on the verge of divorce, all because Tom got a new job and made more money than Lynette ever did. She could no longer control her marriage, or her husband, and Tom had finally stepped out of his "I'm forty-five years old and still don't know what I want to do with my life" phase. I'm not saying having these two facing divorce wasn't a good idea, I'm saying they should've done it earlier on and not saved it to the last season when everything was ending (including the show's once soaring ratings). They reunite by season's end and everything is okay again, but everything in the middle is pretty hard to sit through. Much like the rest of the season. To me, it seems the producers saw they had one last season, so they figured they could do whatever they wanted and get away with it. Just like on Roseanne, when the once working-class Conner family had won the lottery and were more than financially secure. It just doesn't work. The Desperate Housewives producers still managed to put on a fairly good series finale after wrapping up the murder cover-up mess, but it would've felt a whole lot better if everything that preceded it had been a better storyline.

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