State of the Show: Desperate Housewives

After posting my little bit about the season finale in "Shark Bites" last week, I started thinking about this show a bit more, and I concluded that maybe the reason I was so unimpressed by the 5-year flash-forward that ended the episode was because I'm a little tired of "Desperate Housewives."

This season was a critical success, with Dana Delany singled out for revitalizing the show. She does indeed deserve credit, but I'm not so sure the show was revitalized overall. Gary Cole, always fun, revitalized things. Carlos losing his sight revitalized he and Gaby, and Bree was entertaining this year, but I'm really getting fed up with the other Housewives.

Lynette's self-righteousness, her terrible mothering, and her bratty kids have grated on me for some time now, perhaps because I get the impression (perhaps inaccurate) that she is supposed to be the most grounded, most reasonable, most--well, sane of all the women. I've found Teri Hatcher an appealing TV presence ever since "Lois and Clark," but the charm is wearing off her Susan. It isn't Hatcher's fault as much as it is the writing staff that insists on making her do mind-bogglingly stupid things each time out. It's like they felt the need to amp up her idiocy since they scaled back her klutziness. I mean, that stunt in the finale where she tried to change her baby's name without Papa Mike knowing? Come on. That was just stupid, and not in a rompy-parody kind of way. it just made the character a clown.

I think the show had some strong points this year and remained entertaining, but I find myself more and more distracted. My wife and I still make it a habit to watch the show together, but I'm generally doing something else while it's on. It's just not a show that can fully engage me.

This brings me to that finale. First of all, the tidy "two birds with one stone" resolution of the Gary Cole and Justine Bateman storylines was all too convenient, and worse, it felt all too much like the shootout that took care of the Laurie Metcalf/Tom's Baby's Mama storylines a while back.

Then there was that flash-forward. It was interesting, I guess, but what about it will make someone more likely to see the show? Supposedly we're going back and forth next season, but I wonder if show head honcho Marc Cherry killed off interest in "the present" by showing us so much about the future.

The one shocker was Susan apparently not being with Mike Delfino, and this may have been the costliest move of all. My wife was not so much intrigued by what happened to Mike as infuriated that he wasn't there. She said she wanted to stop watching the show because of that. She was joking--I think--but still, it wasn't a crowd-pleasing development. I don't know how it'll play out, but they might have sacrificed some audience goodwill for shock value.

Not every show is "Lost" and can get away with this sort of thing. In fact, the gimmick really did revitalize that ABC hit. Ratings were down for "Desperate Housewives" after the strike, but that's not unusual for serialized network dramas, so it's hard to say if it's indicative of something specific to the series or a reflection of a larger trend. Either way, Cherry clearly felt he had to do something to shake things up. The flash-forward may have been the most Desperate thing to ever happen on this comedy/soap, and it's a reflection of how stale some of the characters and situations are right now.

So I'll be back in the fall, but again it'll mostly be out of habit, and I'll be curious as to what the "5 Years Later" montage means, but that in and of itself isn't enough to make this appointment viewing for me. I'm not even sure what could be done to make it so at this point. I might just be burnt out a little bit by Wysteria Lane.