Real Desperate Housewives

What is the appeal of ABC’s Desperate Housewives? Could it be that it has nothing to do with real desperate housewives? They way I look at it, there are two groups of desperate housewives. A) Those who problems are so profoundly sad and/or dangerous they could in no way be incorporated into fluffy entertainment. B) Those whose desperation is already being touched on by sitcoms.
The wives on Wysteria Lane are so different, so unreal, so.....entertaining. (“Wysteria Lane” is the archetypal Hollywood neighborhood street. You can make a little game of naming all the shows and movies that you’ve seen it in. And I think there is a reason that they haven’t tried to disguise it. Oh, and I’m sure one of the houses was once lived in by Beaver Cleaver. So poetic....) Their desperation is very unlike mine. No one is wandering with the beginnings of a head cold that just won’t get on with it. None of these ladies has a head so stuffy that she thought the priest was speaking in Latin at Mass when he most certainly wasn’t; their angst isn’t symbolized by the loose and poorly laid kitchen tiles; their terror isn’t caused by hearing the strange scratchings of what may be a rodent moving in for the winter; their shock and disappointment with their children is not proven by a boy taking his coat off at church to reveal a “Sponge Bob Party Pants” T-shirt. I guess I’ll keep my desperation and bide my time until Arrested Development is back on. *

*This week also included some sort of swipe at homeschooling, but I didn’t catch if it was nasty, funny, nasty-funny. I dozed in and out of most of the show in a drug induced haze...just trying to clear my head for the week ahead. It didn’t help. And I was really off guard when a fight broke out between the boys during a spirited game of Riskopoly. Don’t ask how to play Riskopoly......it involves mixing the pieces of Risk and Monopoly. Rules? Who knows. But it appears to end with shouting, maternal palpitations and one child (winner? loser?) locking his bedroom door while the other pounds and yells, “It’s my room, too.”