'Desperate Housewives' is Speculative Fiction. Here's the Proof!

If you're familiar with the iconic 8-season dramedy Desperate Housewives, this might not come as a surprise. The soapy, campy elements, the characters, and the disinterest in reality push this classic show into magic realism territory. It's got everything! Questionable sexual liaisons, scandalous crimes, salacious gossip. The show is focused entirely on exploring suburbia's commitment to keeping up appearances. So at every turn, and past the point of reason, we're reminded that none of us truly knows what's going on behind closed doors. I'll keep it vague, but because I'll be employing examples, please be advised of spoilers.

Soapier than a bubble bath, campier than the girl scouts:

How many comas are too many? How many cheating ex-husbands, and how many tempting pool boys? The writers of this show were on pills and I love them for it. Every single episode is so jam-packed with juicy details, geared to make you clutch your pearls, that they start and end each episode with a mini summary. The editors make it literally impossible to lose the plot, and with 180 episodes, it's the best bed-rotting show imaginable.

One of the housewives' mother-in-law, on the way to reveal her rampant cheating, is struck by a car-- falling into a six-month-long coma. Who was driving the car, you might ask? Another housewife's son, drunk as a skunk! Time for a rehab arc! (there are lots of those). The mother-in-law comes to, still hell-bent on revealing her daughter-in-law's faithlessness, only to fall down the hospital stairs. She's dying, and with her final breath, she gives the message to a nurse... who's wearing earbuds, and doesn't hear a thing.

Don't feel too bad for the cuck, because he cheats right back... with his wife's SURROGATE! Dear god! And when that baby is born? It's not even theirs (any of theirs). The fertility clinic was scrambling vials around willy nilly. If you think that's the only "switched at birth" plotline, you'd be mistaken.

The campiest element, introduced in the pilot and maintained throughout, is the series' narrator: one the housewives, dead under mysterious circumstances, narrates her neighbors' every move. Solving the mystery of her death is the show's first focus, but it goes off the rails quick. The seriousness of the tragic situation is frustrated by the show's flippant, insensitive tone, and I found myself constantly wondering, are they for real right now? The out of pocket tone adds to the production's charm, once you develop a taste for it, because it mirrors its audience. If you grew up in suburbia, perhaps you remember your friend's moms, and how they might recount genuinely tragic gossip in the most insensitive way possible. It's just like that.

The narrator, Mary Alice, with her creepy husband and creepy baby, both of whom take "creep" to a new level.

The "characters":

The quotes are there because none of these women, their husbands and children, their nemeses, or their lovers, are three dimensional human beings. They're stereotypes, symbols, archetypes, or some combination of the three. The housewives' three or four personality traits make them into caricatures of suburban women, shorthand for the show's audience, allowing them to instantly connect them to people they know, or vice versa-- "She's so Lynette!", etc. Perhaps I'm being unfair. A couple of the characters grow, and it's delightful. Otherwise, they stick to the basics, outlined below.

1. Susan Mayer

   

   Former cheerleader and part-time mean girl turned ditzy children's book illustrator (we never see the books). She's a clumsy single mom who's always looking for love! Dominant traits: cute, ditz, klutz.

2. Lynette Scavo

   

   Powerful career woman who suddenly has more children than she ever wanted. Lynette is bossy, opinionated, ambitious, and tough as nails. Her children are rude and loud, her husband is canonically well-endowed.

3. Bree Van de Kamp

   
   

   

   Uptight, conservative, and a proper lady in every way! Bree is a 1950s style housewife who performs her duties with almost disturbing rigidity. She canonically owns guns. Luckily she gets a girlboss arc.

4. Gabrielle Solis

   
   

   

   Gorgeous, vain, rich! All of Gabi's problems for five years straight (out of the show's eight year run) are directly related to her looks. At one point she calls her face "proof of God's existence." Werk!

5. Bonus: Edie Britt

   

   Edie isn't a part of the Big 4. She functions as a amoral antagonist who rejects the power of female friendship in favor of male company. No one's husband is off-limits, and to make matters worse, she's canonically a poor mother. Edie's role evinces the internalized misogyny of the early 2000s more than any other character: she's hot, sexually free, and refuses to apologize... thus she must be punished. Her dominant characteristic is slutty.

Somehow, the simplicity of the housewives' characteristics makes them effective parts of the show's moralizing vignettes-- they show how acknowledged "types" of women would react to certain situations, providing moral examples or anti-examples of behavior. DH's moralizing undercurrent is worthy of note. It's a generalized interest in ethical behavior, and you may detect whiffs of Christianity. Understated, sure, but present, particularly in the characterization of Edie as a Jezebel figure, and in the abrupt drop of a lesbian plotline, much to my chagrin. In any event, the insertion of allegory into a soap opera feels very speculative.

The wholesale rejection of reality:

Cause and effect, normative behavior, the flow of natural conversation... these underpinnings of the real world are often cast aside for the glory of drama. It really does make for great TV. Plotlines are dropped at will, and the writers have no compunction about peppering in unrealistically violent or outlandish crimes. It's like they're spinning a wheel with spots for "addiction," "murder," "cheating," and "pregnancy." Masterful.

A couple light examples: Bree discovers, to her horror, that her teenage son is at the strip club, so she joins him and orders the house Chardonnay. Gabi's husband Carlos tries to beat up the man he thinks she's cheating on him with, but the man is gay and Carlos is charged with a hate crime. Another housewife's husband has been seeing a dominatrix, but she's a married neighbor... she gets charged with prostitution and serves time. The series is set in the fictional "Eagle State." Insane! And, one of my personal favorites, Jane Lynch's guest character gets arrested for, um. See for yourself.

The last line of narration is a perfect example of that out of pocket tone I alluded to. These writers knew no bounds, and the ways they chose to be crazy classify the show as speculative fiction in my book. A case for magic realism, specifically, could be made because of how the dead are portrayed-- they're vividly a part of the living world. Several characters who pass away guest-narrate episodes, and if that sounds deranged, you've got the right idea.

Awww, look how cute they are! It's been over 20 years since Desperate Housewives first aired... about time they made a reboot (with Kerry Washington, no less!).