[On October 15, 1951, I Love Lucy premiered on CBS. The show was many things, but at its heart it was a cultural depiction of a housewife—a common & complex category across our history to be sure. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such fictional figures, leading up to a weekend post featuring my own wife’s phenomenal work on the subject!]
On how a fun fictional show paved the way for some frustrating “real” ones, and why it’s not that simple.
First things first: Desperate Housewives (2004-12), all 8 seasons/180 episodes of which Vaughn and I binged our way through earlier this year, was at its heart a delightfully crazy prime-time soap opera. I blogged about that complex genre at length in that hyperlinked post on king of the genre Aaron Spelling (part of a weeklong series on soaps more broadly), so please check that one out if you would and then come on back for further thoughts about this particular night-time soap.
Calling the show a night-time soap can help us understand one of its most potentially frustrating features, the way in which huge events would transpire and then be seemingly forgotten half-a-season (or sometimes just a couple episodes) later; so it goes with the soap opera genre. But the category doesn’t let Desperate Housewives off the hook when it comes to potential cultural effects; indeed, the show was very popular, as soaps often are, so in many ways the category only amplifies the need to examine such effects. And I would argue that in its portrayal of wealthy and attractive housewives acting—towards each other, their neighbors and the community at large, their own spouses and children, random strangers, you name it—in genuinely insane and often deeply unethical and immoral ways, none of which were meant to keep audiences from cheering them on, this work of fiction clearly paved the way for the tellingly named reality TV behemoth that is the Real Housewives franchise (the first installment of which, Orange County, debuted two years after Desperate). As I argued in this long-ago post on literary soaps, there are important antecedents to both shows that we should keep in mind; but there’s also an unmistakable, direct, and to my mind hugely frustrating line between Desperate Housewives and the Real Housewives franchise.
Similarities or throughlines don’t make things identical, however, and there’s also a very important distinction between the two that puts Desperate Housewives in a better light. I’m not talking about the difference between scripted and reality TV, because we all know that “reality” TV is ridiculously scripted. No, I’m talking about the fact that Desperate featured a number of very talented actors, including at least three of the four main leads (on Teri Hatcher, the jury is still out), and tons of great supporting performers as well; while from what I’ve seen (and I’ll admit it’s not a ton, so as always feel free to correct me if you think I get things wrong!), the Real Housewives are as bad at acting as they are at being human. That doesn’t just mean that Desperate is a significantly better cultural work, although it does mean that and as someone who binged 180 episodes I’m grateful for it. It also and more importantly means that these talented performers could bring layers and nuances to their characters, even—if not indeed especially—when they were doing heinous things. At their best, those acting choices could ask the audience both to imagine themselves in these situations and to see and critique the flaws in these characters, as the best works of art can do. Did I just end this series on cultural housewives by calling Desperate Housewives one of our best works of art? Looks like I did!
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Cultural housewives you’d highlight?
Leave a Reply