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Desperate Housewives: Difference between revisions
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Not a porn mag, but a US TV drama.
Bored wives in [[Suburbia]] experience unrealistic drama in their lives after the suicide of their friend.
Notable for its combination [[Narrator]]/[[Near-Death Clairvoyance]] trope, in which the entire series is narrated by the dulcet tones of an apparently omnipresent dead woman - the friend who committed suicide.
Basically a comedic [[Soap Opera|soap]], which means that unlike a regular soap, this program is funny and has interesting plotlines. However, the situations are often just as ridiculous and the relationships and plots just as hopelessly tangled-up and interwoven as any old-fashioned soap (though ''unlike'' daytime soaps, the fast pace tends to leave many confused if they miss a couple of episodes - probably why the [[Clip Show]] specials still proved relatively popular).
Owing to creator Marc Cherry's penchant for comedy, the series pokes fun at itself and its characters about as often as it takes them seriously, probably the number one thing that attracted most of its initial viewership, aside from the fact that it throws vicious, subversive holes in the ideas of suburban paradise and maternal bliss. In fact, ratings dropped after [[Executive Meddling]] caused the second season to be more "dramatic" (read: melodramatic) leading to the panicked execs basically saying "OK, OK we'll go back to doing more comedy again, Marc. You win." Ratings apparently improved again after that point.
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== Character Tropes ==
* [[Affably Evil]]: {{spoiler|Mary Alice, our cheerful sing-song narrator who kidnapped a baby, then later killed said baby's mother and dismembered the corpse}}.
** Dave Williams/{{spoiler|Dash}} is this. Despite what he's trying to do, he does come across as a genuinely nice guy.
* [[Alphabetical Theme Naming]] / [[Letter Motif]]: Lynette's kids; Porter, Parker, Preston,Penny, and Paige. Paige's twin, a baby Tom and Lynette lost, was to be named Patrick.
* [[Aluminum Christmas Trees]]: Gabrielle once tries to convince Carlos that she has "sexsomnia". Probably fewer than ten percent watching the show know [[wikipedia:Sleep sex|it's a real condition]].
* [[Amicably Divorced]]: Susan and Karl during the third season. And after the first season their relationship went from toxic to a snarky competitiveness than anything.
* [[Asshole Victim]]: {{spoiler|Irina, Preston's Russian fiancee}}.
** {{spoiler|Martha Huber}}.
** {{spoiler|Nora Huntington}}.
* [[Badass Bystander]]: No one seemed to expect that the psychopathic gun toting hostage holder in Season 3 to be taken down and shot by {{spoiler|a nameless extra who commented earlier that the woman with the gun taught her daughter's Sunday school class}}.
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* [[Bratty Teenage Daughter]]: Played straight with Danielle, averted with Julie.
* [[Butt Monkey]]: Everyone gets this treatment at one point or another during the show, but Bree and Tom Scavo appear to be the go-to characters for when the writers need something horrible to happen to a character.
** Susan gets her fair share of this also, to the point where the other housewives don't bat an eyelid when they find out she's in trouble yet again.
* [[The Chew Toy]]: Lynette. Lynette has, among other things, had a plethora of uncontrollable children who constantly make her life even harder, was shot in a hostage situation after finding out her husband has a love-child, is diagnosed with cancer and once cured from cancer there is a tornado which buries her family in rubble, then framed for abuse by her stepdaughter, then a whole load of personal hell... then she gets into a divorce with her husband of 20 or so years..
** Lee as well.
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* [[Fag Hag]]: When Bob and Lee move in, Susan is excited to become this. Though this only irritates them and cause them to seriously dislike her. By Season Five though, she and Lee become decent friends.
* [[Floorboard Failure]]: Susan managed to suspend herself between two floors when it happened to her in her house.
* [[Four-Girl Ensemble]]: The original housewives, Bree, Susan, Lynette and Gabby.
* [[Four-Temperament Ensemble]]: Susan is sanguine, Bree is melancholic, Lynette is phlegmatic and Gabrielle is choleric.
** The husbands qualifies as well: Orson is melancholic, Carlos is choleric, Tom is sanguine and Mike is phlegmatic.
* [[Gold Digger]]: Preston Scavo's fiancée, Irina.
* [[Housewife]]: It's in the title.
* [[Huge Guy, Tiny Girl]]: Carlos is a big hot blooded bruiser, and Gabrielle is so small that ''anyone'' can pick her up over their shoulder, and in one episode was able to quickly hide herself inside a small travel bag and carried around discretely.
** Makes you wonder how she became a model at all, considering models are usually super-tall; runway models are 5'10" at a minimum. It can be assumed that Gabrielle was some other type of model, perhaps a petite model or catalogue model.
*** Indeed, being tall isn't a prerequisite for many men's magazines/glamor models (and Eva Longoria is no stranger to such spreads in real life).
* [[Impoverished Patrician]]: Carlos and Gabrielle spend the majority of Seasons 2, 3, and 4 unemployed, yet they still live in a luxurious house, attending big parties, and collecting clothes with all the right labels.
** In Season 4, Carlos sinks their savings in an embezzlement scam, and then loses the papers for the off-shore account and goes blind for 5 years, in that time having two kids. Then he gets his sight back and almost immediately gets a high-paying job.
* [[Ivy League for Everyone]]: Every one of the families seem to be able to sneak their kids into the same incredibly exclusive and expensive private school. Though Lynette every now and then mentions the financial troubles with it, and Susan manages to get MJ in by getting employed as a teacher's assistant.
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* [[Little Miss Snarker]]: Julie in the earlier seasons.
* [[Mama Bear]]: Susan goes ballistic whenever a member of her family is harmed.
** Bree turns a gun on anyone who messes with her children.
* [[Mysterious Past]]: Almost everyone.
* [[Near-Death Clairvoyance]]: Mary Alice.
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* [[Shock Value Relationship]]: Andrew and Justin.
* [[Spotlight-Stealing Squad]]: The cover[http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51IfLnIErtL._SL500_AA300_.jpg of Season Seven's DVD] blatantly has Renee standing center stage while all of the main characters are off in the background. Despite the fact that she was only introduced that very season, and was in no way had an important role or was even involved in that season's story arc.
** Susan was this for the first season, to the point where she could have been the main character.
* [[Stepford Smiler]]: Bree, an apparently OCD woman who probably carries at least half of the "domestic bliss" satire.
* [[Suspiciously Similar Substitute]]: Renee, who has an identical personality to Edie, wears similar clothes to her, and lives in the same house.
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** Of course, "already cremated" means that there was no body. But it never went anywhere.
* [[The Fun in Funeral]]: Rex's funeral, indescribably wrong and weirdly funny.
* [[Gosh Hornet]]: In Season 2, when Edie winds up disturbing a yellow jackets' nest and is stung pretty badly. Its left up to the audience whether this is dramatic or hilarious.
* [[Here We Go Again]]: {{spoiler|The ending of the very last episode features a woman moving into Susan's house after she leaves, taking out a box that she looks at with worry before hiding it, clearly implying it containing a secret. And that's where it ends}}.
* [[Impaled with Extreme Prejudice]]: {{spoiler|Victor Lang, Gabby's evil mayor husband}}, ended up impaled by a white picket fence.
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* [[Nice Job Fixing It, Villain]]: Nora, when trying to seduce Tom by supporting his idea of enterprise, from Lynette, who was critical about it.
* [[Room Full of Crazy]]: The episode "If..." features Gabby having a nightmare where she becomes [[My Beloved Smother]] to Celia, causing Carlos to leave her, slowly loose her [[Sanity Slippage|grip on reality]] and living off ''food-stamps'' in her house with the walls covered in newspaper clippings.
* [[Season Finale]] / [[Wham! Episode]]: Usually involving a death and/or disaster.
* [[Teen Pregnancy]]: Danielle in Season 3/4.
* [[Treehouse of Fun]]: Lynette's kids briefly have a tree house in their yard for them to hang out in, though its destroyed in a tornado a few episodes later.
* [[Two-Person Pool Party]]: The way we find out Andrew is gay is that he's doing this with his friend Justin.
* [[Verbal Tic]]: Mary Alice has a fondness of constantly beginning a narration with "Yes..."
* [[Victim Falls For Rapist]]/[[Black Comedy Rape]]: If you want to have a baby with your ex-husband (and thereby force him back into marriage with you), just drug him and rape him! And make sure you do the reveal with the wife realizing what was done to her husband by his ex by having her use the "R" word in an over the top fashion.
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== Show-Wide Tropes ==
* [[Acceptable Feminine Roles]]: Underlying the whole show is this.
* [[The Adventure Continues]]: The last scene and ending narration indicate that although the main characters will all eventually leave Wisteria Lane and never really meet again, life there will go on its merry way without them.
* [[Anyone Can Die]]: Reserved for plot twist moments. While most of the time they only kill off villains and B-characters no one really cares about, every once in a while they'll surprise you by killing off someone important.
* [[Arc Words]]: As of Season 8, the note saying {{spoiler|I know what you did, it makes me sick, I'm going to tell}}.
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* [[Derailing Love Interests]]: Orson in Season 5, though he got back on the rails in Season 6.
* [[Double Standard]]: The very different treatment of Paul Young and {{spoiler|Mary Alice}} who are eventually revealed to have committed the exact same crimes. {{spoiler|Murderer and kidnapper Mary Alice is remembered with nothing but fondness by the four main female cast}} while Paul was shunned from very early on.
** Paul had difficulty with acting as if he didn't have something to hide - he {{spoiler|tore out his pool to remove the body of the woman his wife killed}} in the middle of the night and was dubbed CreePaul by [[Television Without Pity]]. Compare that to Mary Alice, who was extremely adept at playing like nothing was wrong.
** While perfectly true this would suggest that the Housewives should be even ''more'' creeped by Mary Alice than by Paul in retrospect, if she could so easily have created a facade. Whenever she is mentioned it is as Mary Alice 'our dear friend who took her life' rather than Mary Alice '{{spoiler|the murderer and kidnapper}} who had us all fooled'.
*** The suicide may have played a role in this : Mary Alice regretted her acts, while Paul never did, as far as we know. Also, Season Seven has made him cross the [[Moral Event Horizon]] ''much'' deeper than Mary Alice ever had.
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* [[Family Business]]: The Scavo pizzeria which {{spoiler|may finally be dead}}.
* [[Fan Service]]: There is a very large amount of male-oriented fan service for a show aimed at women. Eva Longoria Parker, anyone?
** Check out [http://www.celebdirtylaundry.com/2008/09/24/desperate-housewives-tv-guide-50s-style-shoot/ this promotional piece for TV guide] which has the Housewives dress in sexy [[The Fifties|Fifties]] pin-up style fashions: a literal housewife (Katherine), [[The Vamp|Vamp]] (Susan), sexy teacher (Lynette), [[Hot Mom]] (Bree), [[Brainless Beauty|airhead]] (Gabrielle) and another housewife (Edie).
* [[Getting Crap Past the Radar]]: The series is downright ''infamous'' for the amount of innuendo it has managed to slip right past the ABC censors, to the point where it could very well have its own page.
* [[Good Adultery, Bad Adultery]]: To list all examples of both the good ''and'' bad adultery on this show would be madness, but Bree enters grey territory.
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* [[Love Makes You Crazy]]: Edie attempting ''suicide'' over a man.
* [[Modern Stasis]]: Post [[Time Skip]] the show is set roughly five years in the future (confirmed in Season 7 dialogue with Bree referencing the events of a 2006 episode as taking place "9 years ago").
* [[Mood Whiplash]]:
** With almost every episode ending on a dramatic note, the ending music never fails to be perky. Also see [[Book Ends]].
** The show often juxtaposes scenes of differing moods (serious, comical, dramatic, emotional, contemplative, surreal, etc). Many storylines in a single episode start off as one mood and end up in another. It is not uncommon to see one of the housewives get into some sort of extremely [[Hilarity Ensues|humorous]] [[Zany Scheme|antic]] (sometimes while playing [[File talk:Mystery Fiction|detective]]), only to reveal [[Beneath the Mask|deep trauma]] or a [[Nightmare Fuel|disturbing fact]] with another character. It is also not uncommon for a sequence of dramatic scenes serving as a set-up for a disastrous...
* [[Mr. Fanservice]]: Most of the guys, but [[Handsome Lech|Karl]], [[Hot Dad|Carlos]], [[Badass|Mike]] and Danny (for the younger girls) stand out the most.
* [[Narrator]]: Mary Alice.
** Edie narrates the episode following {{spoiler|her own death}}.
** {{spoiler|Rex Van de Kamp did it first after his own death}}.
* [[Necro Non Sequitur]]: Many characters' deaths or injuries are like this, where previous scenes set-up the death of the characters. These tend to occur in the middle and the end of a season, and oftentimes storylines intersect with each other to provide the proper circumstances.
* [[No Bisexuals]]: According to the characters on the show, if Katherine admits she's attracted to women, it means she must forsake her attraction to men entirely. It's impossible to like both, apparently.
* [[Obnoxious In-Laws]]: Every single mother-in-law on the show, without exception.
* [[Out-of-Genre Experience]]: The [[Disaster Movie|disaster]] episodes are often quite of a different tone from the rest of the show.
** In the episode "Bang!" in Season 3, {{spoiler|Carolyn Bigsby}} snaps and takes the people in a local supermarket [[Hostage Situation|hostage]]. The episode is also peppered with Lynette having [[Recurring Dreams]] of Mary Alice.
** Season 4 has the episode "Something's Coming" has a storm coming to Wisteria Lane. This episode provides an example of [[Necro Non Sequitur]].
** Season 5 has "City of Fire", where a tragic fire occurs in a club.
** Season 6 has "Boom Crunch", which details how a series of events [[Necro Non Sequitur|lead up]] to a [[Trainwreck Episode|plane crash]] in Wisteria Lane.
** Season 7 has "Down the Block There's a Riot", where a protest in Wisteria Lane erupts into a riot.
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[[Category:Clip Art Animation]]
[[Category:Dramedy]]
[[Category:
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