‘I can’t believe they went there’: 20 years of the silly, sexy and utterly outrageous Desperate Housewives

It was brazenly shocking, deeply problematic – and a pop culture phenomenon. Two decades later, we revisit the women of Wisteria Lane who took the world by storm

A couple of months ago, Eva Longoria told the Observer that, after 20 years, people are still discovering Desperate Housewives, the show that made her an overnight star when it first arrived in 2004. The campy, suburban melodrama-mystery was a pop culture phenomenon in its day. It’s hard to overstate just how huge it was, though the fact that it still comes up in every interview with anyone who played a part in it should give some indication. Only recently, its lingering influence has revealed itself in Agatha All Along, in an episode that owes a visual debt to Wisteria Lane, and with a nod in Only Murders in the Building, in which Longoria is guest-starring as a version of herself.

Desperate Housewives wrapped for good in 2012, after eight seasons and more behind-the-scenes drama than it had character deaths – and it had a whopping 57 of those. (Its Vanity Fair cover shoot, and the pointed interview with the cast and creators, remains an all-time classic of the genre.) In the years since it departed, it has found a new audience through streaming, but to go back to the start and watch it again for the first time since it ended is to catapult oneself back to an entirely different era.

Continue reading…

Please follow and like us: