Why is Desperate Housewives forgotten?

Because Marc Cherry hit me!

It really wasn't very good to begin with, as soap operatic camp or as mystery thriller.

It was firmly grounded in frau-ishness to begin with and never rose above that. It was 'transgressive and edgy' for the mug-cradler set; so, in other words, bland and formulaic.

In My Own Humble Opinion.

Also, Teri Hatcher isn't good. Full stop.

r2 is right. The first season was excellent but it went immediately to shit when the cast's egos came out and Cherry showed he didn't have anything else up his sleeve. Even bringing respected actress Alfre Woodard in couldn't stop the show from suffering from the sophomore slump.

Apparently it got better but when I tried to get into it again, I found it was not very well written.

Hatcher seems to be an insufferable bitch.

Because Jesse Metcalfe didn't take off his shirt enough to show us that glorious chest.

At the time (mid 2000s--pre-Netflix/Hulu/multitude of good shows on the interwebs), the dark humor of the first season was refreshing, then it quickly jumped the shark as the writers/producers clearly had no long term goals for it. It devolved into frau territory with a season-long "mystery" that was something out of the worst of the Nancy Drew books.

I was just thinking about this earlier. There is a whole slew of serialized dramas that had excellent casts, ran for many seasons, and were very popular - like DH, Brothers & Sisters, Sisters, Thirty-Something, The Practice, etc. - yet you never hear about them or see them on syndication or streaming. It's weird - they burned brightly and then disappeared from pop culture and our collective minds just as fast.

DH Season One is a great miniseries. The rest is so-so.

It was good. Not as bad as you bitter Marys are claiming. It was just pulpy evening soap fun. We all enjoyed it. Teri Hatcher was fun and then she sabotaged herself with the separate story lines. I still liked her.

Because Teri Hatcher is a CUNT.

The first season was good, but they should have done mini-serieish on the subsequent ones. Like AHS, with different characters and actresses.

I still remember it fondly, especially for Felicity Huffman.

I always wanted to fuck cuddly Carlos.

I would let JaimuecDenton duck me bareback

Who didn’t love the eco terrorist storyline?

To expand on R7, dramas rarely have a second life the way comedies do.

With comedies you can re-watch any random episode and it's still funny, where watching a random episode of a drama feels out of place.

The exception are shows like the Law and Order franchise where the back story of the cops is secondary to the crime they are trying to solve.

Ryan Carnes anyone?

Anytime Lily Tomlin is brought in as a recurring character, you know the series has hit the wall.

Because each episode doesn’t stand independently on its own. You have to watch them all in order start to finish.

Teri Snatcher!!!!

Susan looked like Michael Jackson

Was this the show where Felicity Huffman made her millions so she could buy her dumb kids into the Ivy League?

I don't know, maybe it's the gay gene in me, but I could watch any random episode of Sisters or DH or Brothers & Sisters and love it all the same, even if it isn't episodic.

Because those cunts didn't speak to anyone, even fellow actors, once "Cut!" was called. I never want to see any of them in another show again. Fucking actresses...

Season 2 was good and season 3 was great.

I think it just had to keep topping itself and simultaneously moving 5 characters forward in interesting ways. That's....impossible to sustain.

Once twisters started coming down the lane and planes started crashing, etc, it needed to stop. The 5 year time jump gave it a temporary boost but it couldn't last.

I also think people liked to tear it down. *looks at other replies*

Some of it was brilliant though. Season 3's BANG was excellent. And I liked Dixie Carter too.

I binged it in quarantine, and it doesn’t really hold up very well. It’s entertaining enough, but it doesn’t seem nearly as edgy and quirky as when it first aired.

Also, Teri is truly a cunt. I did the Cabaret tour with her, and she’s lucky she didn’t get strangled.

R26 Stories?

Its not forgotten. We might not discuss it ad nauseam like other shows you semi-senile OCD queens like to go on about forever, but we do remember it.

The show was great maybe a little played out in the end but an amazing cast. The backstage drama just adds to the lure. Season one was the best and the 2nd underrated!!! Plus so many hot men.

Dana Delany killed the show

It's strange, ABC had 3 massive hits in one year; Desperate Housewives, Lost and Grey's Anatomy. Looking back those shows were the last big things to come from network television. DH was the biggest of them all and yet it is the forgotten one. Lost is still talked about when referring to massive cult hits and had a couple of cast members go onto some big projects and Greys is still going (even though it should've ended a long time ago). DH had an amazing first season, it mixed dark humor and drama perfectly, then Cherry took a step back during season 2 and it was a mess. He returned to season 3 but more out of obligation than passion and that could be felt. Season 3 to 5 were better than season 2 but they didn't have that spark that season 1 had. Season 6 to 8 were just going through the motions. Hell, Cherry wasn't really there during season 8, as he was busy trying to get that maids show off the ground.

I watched "that Maids show" too and enjoyed it but such things are forgettable. One moves on. Why the need to revere trash TV? I hardly EVER revisit series.

2 was a slight disappointment after the first season, but it was still pretty good TV. The Bree storyline was especially great that year. Season 3 was a lot better and 4 held up better than I'd expected, but the five year time jump in season 5 is where it flew off the tracks. I've never been able to go past a few episodes of season 6. It lost something.

The influence of DH is still all over television. It really resurrected the primetime serial drama that you see all over television and streaming these days, and if it weren't for DH, there would be no Real Housewives franchise.

Don't forget about Dancing With the Stars, r31. ABC really hit the jackpot that season.

I really enjoyed most of the first four seasons. There were always storylines I didn't really care for, but overall I eagerly awaited the next episode. But Season 5 onward was an absolute joke.

The issue is the show didn't have an antagonist character like Edie after season 5.

I really liked the cranky older couple on DH played by Kathryn Joosten and Orson Bean. Poor Kathryn died right after the show ended and Orson just got run over by a car last year. May they Rest In Peace.

R37 Oh I had no idea about Orson, poor guy, I hope he didn't feel much pain.

I loved Mrs. McCluskey -- she was a riot and a part of what made the later seasons great. I haven't seen the show since the finale, so my memories are rather hazey. I started watching it from a young age (7?) in 2004. My parents wouldn't let me watch Adult Swim or anything involving sex, but this show was okay? I remember it having very saucy sex scenes, including anal cancer queen Marcia Cross as Bree Van de Kamp. I remember when she married Orson, and one of her kids (stepchild?) had a boy. They were apparently Jewish, and had struggled with deciding on getting the son circumcised.

Thus my parents told me I was circumcised right after, and all the curiosities began. I think I owe Marc Cherry a drink, he made me discover I was curious for dick! And gay because of it.

So many great supporting characters! Jolie Fisher was great season two as Lynette’s boss. Such a bitch.

Once they solved the reason why the narrator committed suicide the show just fell apart.

Plots would start and then suddenly end. (Alfre Woodard's role, Doug Savant having an illegitimate kid)

R26 SPILL! THE! TEA!!I want to hear EVERYTHING about the tour :)

Personally, I always liked her, especially on Lois & Clark...and found it interesting that the other DH ladies seemed to hate her in the end, while Katheryn Joosten (Mrs McClusky) said she was kind in her last interview when she was dying IRL.

And then there's her and Dean Cain. He now seems like a Repubkican Trump-supporting asshat....but she apparently doesn't mind him at all.

The time in which that show aired was such a delightfully crap era for television.

Gastineau Girls

The Simple Life

The OC

One Tree Hill

The Gilmore Girls

Growing Up Gotti

MTv True Life and MADE(which I sort of liked, TBH)

Work Out

I was just about to graduate high school. Simpler times for sure, but fresher and more wholesome, too.

Because there is nothing culturally significant about it that seeps into popular culture or is referenced by the people long after the show is done.

A taste of Teri in the national tour of "Cabaret"---

DH was more of a soap than a proper drama, with all the improbable disasters stacking up in each character's bio. Stuff like that is disposable, has no depth and no-one watches it back. Fun example of the absurdities to which it quickly sank: I couldn't remember what had happened to a particular character, so I looked it up on this fansite. Look for "Manner of Death"!

R43 That post-9/11, pre-streaming era of TV was a delight! I was in high school at the time as well and we had our own water cooler talks after episodes aired. Desperate Housewives was fun to chatter about, but that first season's the only one I'd say was classic. 2 was a let down, and 3 had a couple bright moments, but I think I eventually outgrew the show.

That era was also great because MADtv was around to take the piss out of everything.

It was the end of the era of network TV. Cable TV/streaming took off right after that, and of course they could get away with much more. So what seemed edgy at the time now seems very tame. Nowadays a show like this wouldn't even be shopped around to a network; it'd go straight to cable.

R43 We're around the same age and I also loved that era of TV.

I also couldn't stop thinking about this show when Big Little Lies was airing.

Those kind of shows can only go for a few seasons before they decline because to keep it entertaining the storylines start to become unrealistic. That much drama doesn't happen in real life. It's not like the characters are doctors or investigators who come across gripping situations every day. If it had the Sex and the City treatment where they had far fewer episodes its reputation would have been stronger but 8 seasons and 180 episodes were too many. No one wants a reunion because it exhausted every possible plot and character development.

Don't all of the actresses hate each other?

I was listening to the excellent Table Manners podcast with Eva Longoria as the guest yesterday and didn't even think about Desperate Housewives.

Wasn’t it just invoked in Felicity’s trail materials within the last year?

R532 They all hated Teri Hatcher. Nicollette Sheridan said she was the meanest woman she had ever met.

The O.C. was another one that had so many episodes each season that they quickly ran out of storylines. No one really talks about that show these days either. It was recently streaming on Hulu for a few months and then taken down, but I enjoyed rewatching it. The adult storylines were usually more interesting than the teen stuff.

As others have mentioned, what really did these shows in was being forced to turn out 20-30 episodes a season. These days, that'd be three seasons worth on a Netflix series. I have to say I'm enjoying the Netflix model more, because it keeps the series going for longer. Something like Dead To Me, which is coming into its third and final season would have probably only been a one season mini-series if it had been done on ABC or Fox in the 2004.

The O.C. burned through so many storylines and twists in season 1 that by season 2 it already felt tired. The best thing that happened to that show was killing off Misha Barton's character, sadly it was to late and the show cancelled at the end of season 4. Had they killed her off at the end of season 2, I reckon the show would've survived a little longer.

I liked when they killed off Barton on The O.C. She was becoming exhausting. I guess most of its audience must have been Barton fangirls, because the ratings started to tank even though season 4 was pretty solid.

I hated Marissa from the jump but clearly underestimated her popularity since season 4 didn't do so well. I actually liked the final episode.

Julie Cooper should be a DL mascot.

The OC had so much potential that it didn't live up to. It really could have been one of the greats. They needed better writers.

[quote]I also couldn't stop thinking about this show when Big Little Lies was airing.

Another show that had a massive decline in quality in season 2.

God I’m still bitter about Brothers and Sisters ending.

The first season of DH was amazing but after season four, the central mysteries ran out of steam and there was a real "musical beds" theme to it as well- Bree romancing Susan's ex-husband for example. The last season was very lacklustre, like Cherry or whomever was in charge by then, just didn't have the energy any more

R60 it's much more compared to OTH.

It it were not for desperate housewives there would be no real housewives franchise. Desperate housewives was the reason real housewives of Orange County was created