These days I find myself liking Edie more than any of the others… she has more depth and soul and vulnerability!
What the hell is wrong with this show? Is it the writing? the acting? the direction? I LOVE Felicity Huffman…I HATE Lynette Schiavo. She’s horrible. Bree has always been…Bree, but these days she’s insufferable. Gaby… well, I never could stand Gaby (and I think it’s freakish the way they keep trying to sell the idea that she…all 5’2" or whatever of her…was a model. Maybe a photography model, a face model…but she’s tiny. Teeny weeny itsy bitsy. Runway my ass.) I don’t think she has a genuinely sensitive hone in her body, I never believe it the few times they try to sell it.
And even Susan is pretty intolerable these days. What used to be charming has crossed over into purely pathetic and annoying.
And Dana Delaney’s character was never pleasant, so that’s nothing new.
I never got this show’s popularity, and now I’m having to suffer the 2nd season on DVD. They are all insufferably annoying. The only thing that makes it viewable is that I have a crush on Teri Hatcher - I hate her character, though.
I don’t ‘get it’ either. I only saw the show a couple of times a long time ago but could not find anything at all that I liked or related to about the characters. It gets a big ‘ho-hum’ from me.
I clicked on this thread thinking the title was “Why are all the Desperate Housewives so incredibly unkillable?” I’ve never watched a single episode of the show, but I thought, hey, maybe it’s more interesting than I thought.
I gave up on this show towards the end of series 1 because I kept thinking exactly the same thing. I think the one that annoys me the most is Lynette who doesn’t seem to know what the fuck she wants and as a result is permanently miserable (I think the character is supposed to encapsulate the dilemma of the modern mother but in fact just seems like a contrary and difficult whinger).
I’ve read the plot synopses of the later series and the show seems to descend into moronic silliness. Even Jesse Metcalfe with his top off isn’t enough to keep my interest engaged in something that dumb.
I enjoyed the first season, then the second got a little wacky, and I couldn’t keep watching after that. I realized just what the OP did–I just didn’t care about any of them. They were all annoying. My Teri Hatcher thing vanished somewhere in those two seasons–she’s just pathetic. At some point I realized the show was no better than a glorified soap opera, but worse, because I wasn’t rooting for anyone in it.
I almost started a thread last night to say the very same thing Stoid said in the OP. My Gosh Lynette is such a jerk. As far as I could see Bree was not flaunting her financial success particularly. No sympathy for Susan and the private school – most public schools can give special help to students who need it. What a jerk. Stealing that necklace? Beyond the pale. And what happened to her boyfriend, Jackson? Did he have the good sense to leave her? Also, why make the gay guy such a stereotypical bitch? Yeah, at this point Edie seems almost likable compared to the others. The writing is so sloppy – no follow-up on what happened with the old lady that Edie’s husband was harassing. Wish the writers would have had the courage to keep Carlos’ character blind, rather than give him the miracle cure. Oh well, don’t think I’ll be following this show any longer.
I stopped watching early in the second season, or maybe it was the third. Second season was Alfre Woodard’s son in the basement, wasn’t it?
The first season mystery was fun – figuring out Mary Alice’s suicide, what was buried under the swimming pool, would Susan and Mike hook up, etc. Then the writers started changing the characters to fit the plot, and nothing made sense after awhile.
The OP is right. None of the characters are anyone you can root for. Even with a farce or a satire, you need someone to care about, and you need to be able to trust the writers.
I was considering starting a DH thread to ask “am I the only (former) fan that has stopped watching”, but you all have saved me the trouble.
For me, the jump-the-shark moment was the tornado episode. I don’t know if there was a change in staff after the writer’s strike was settled, or they ran out of plausible story lines, or the show/premise had just run its course, but I’ve left. I enjoyed the characters, even though each had some minor trait that I found annoying and unenjoyable; now, though, those little quirks have been magnified 17x, making each of them a caricature of a real person.
In real life, the actor playing Jackson was in a terrible car crash, so they had to write him out of the show. For now. I don’t know if he’s going to come back, but he had a serious head injury.
Oh, and last night I wanted to kick Susan right in her dumb entitled ass for making a BFD over getting her li’l one in a very expensive private school. Because the public schools were just SO bad, and the kid is falling behind and not getting any help.
The kid is in kindergarten! Or first grade! How much help does he need??? If he’s that bad off, he should be put in special ed. A tutor at about $30 bucks an hour is a thought, but then he doesn’t get to wear a keen blazer.
I’m not sure why I still watch. I guess I’m just roped in by the soap opera aspect. The housewives themselves are annoying. The show still makes me laugh sometimes though, and it’s worth it to see what happens to everyone surrounding the housewives who get caught up in their drama.
Maybe part of the fun is watching just how annoying the housewives can be. I’ve hated Lynette since season one. I guess it’s a love to hate thing.
Damn, I had no idea about the actor who plays Jackson (Gale Harold). Wikipedia says it was a motorcycle accident but he was released from intensive care last October. Hope he’s okay.
DH has always struck me as your basic, run-of-the-mill Soap Opera.
I have watched it (momentarily anyway, I can’t take more than a minute or two of “Fake Angst”) because Marcia Cross is one of the hottest women on the planet!
I have no idea why it’s so hard to write a likeable female cast of characters. Sex and the City had the same problem, IMHO. I hate them all and won’t watch the show because of it. Is there any show on TV with an all-female main cast?
And I’m not talking about perfect characters. You have to be able to write someone the audience can root for even if she does morally sketchy things. Male characters like this abound, but it’s hard to find female characters like this.
It’s annoying because this show went downhill faster than any other I can remember. Season 1 was really funny and well-written. The mystery was good, and while the housewives were all somewhat annoying, you would root for them when they were in trouble. Except Gabby, who’s kind of an awful human being and should have been forcibly relocated from Wisteria Lane sometime very early on. Sometimes the plot lost focus, and sometimes there were threads that went nowhere, but it was still fun to watch. Season 2, however, was a mess. It was like the writers blew all the good plotlines in S1 and were just throwing shit at the wall. I quit watching sometime toward the end of S2 and have only seen/heard bits and pieces of anything since then.
