Snark Attack: “Desperate Housewives” – Better Off Dead?

Two bits of major news. First of all, we're changing the name of the column from "Recap Attack" to "Snark Attack" to give me more leeway in what I talk about regarding any given show. I won't have to stick solely to that week's episode, and you won't necessarily have had to watch it to appreciate all the snark coming your way. Tell your friends!

The second piece of news, and it's a big one, is that this week’s column is coming to you directly from Heaven. That's right I’m dead! And you thought you had a bad week.

Who would have thought I’d meet such an untimely end? I was just driving happily along in an open convertible, my new Prada scarf twisted around my neck and blowing in the breeze behind me. Then I ate a bad oyster, drank Coke and Pop Rocks, fell asleep next to a pet python whose cage I forgot to lock, and went skydiving with my dirty laundry strapped to my back instead of a parachute.

I did all that and made it through just fine.

But then I read Mike Huckabee’s latest thoughts on gay marriage and my head exploded.

So now here I am in the heavenly afterlife, floating on a cloud along with my new BFFs Oscar Wilde, Divine, and Harvey Milk. Oh, all us gays are here in Heaven, not that that should come as a surprise. In fact, we all play Scrabble together. Sometimes Mother Teresa joins in, but we have to watch carefully. She loves to cheat.

Oh, and look over there … It’s Anita Bryant, Roy Cohn, and Jesse Helms! Yeah, they’re up here too. But don’t worry – it’s just for their daily work shift. Once they’re done cleaning out the unicorn stables, they’ll be back you-know-where. Anita dear, dress light. I hear it can get rather warm down where you are.

Anyway, as faboo as it is up here, it can get a bit tedious. There’s only so many times you can pluck your way through ABBA songs on the harp before it gets a little boring. (God just loves ABBA!) So I spend my time peeking down on Earth and following what’s up on all the TV shows I used to watch.

Oh look down over there … it’s The Office! Sorry, Office, but losing Steve Carell is the least of your problems these days. Oh, and over there is Top Chef. Go Carla!

And over here is Desperate Housewives. Wow, I haven’t seen that in years. What’s going on with these ladies nowadays, I wonder? It looks like Gabrielle Solis is finding that being a parent in the suburbs means...

Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?

Excuse me? Who is this? And what are you doing on my cloud? Get off of my cloud!

It’s me. Mary Alice. Narrating this show from the dead is my gig! It has been for years.

Yeah, I know. And you kind of suck at it. It’s one of the reasons I quit watching this thing back in Season 2. I couldn’t take any more of your sing-songy pronouncements. Besides which, don’t you think it’s sort of weird that after all these years, you’re still obsessively watching your old friends and commenting on their lives? You’re like Single White Female meets Ghost.

You’re one to talk. You think making catty remarks about TV shows makes you special? Besides which, you were hardly so catty when our show premiered. You and all your little gay friends just loved us! Which makes sense, given that pre-RuPaul, we were the closest thing you’d find to a drag show on primetime.

That’s not fair. I never bought that tired old argument that the desperate housewives were meant to be a bunch of drag queens. Our interest as gay men was much more complex than that. It had more to do with how, as with so many of the divas we worship, these were “difficult” women – ones who find ways to subvert and defy the subservient roles society tries to confine them in. For some reason gay men can identify with that. (Gee, I wonder why).

In the first season, Desperate Housewives mined genuine comedy – and a fair number of shocks – by demonstrating just how un-housewifely these women behaved. Of course, Marc Cherry was doing that even before this show aired. Look at how The Golden Girls challenged conventional notions of widowhood and spinsterdom.

Plus, it didn’t hurt that Desperate Housewives had a satisfying rotation of hot hunks who were shamelessly treated as sex objects. A little bitchy humor and a few naked torsos will get you pretty far with us.

If we had all that going for us, then why did you quit watching? You gays ditched us faster than celebrities do court-ordered rehab.

Because after the first season the plotting got muddled (Hello man chained in the basement!), and the writing got repetitive and predictable. The problem is that once we come to expect characters to act subversively, it’s not really so subversive when that’s exactly what they do. So what had once been edgy and surprising became conventional and tedious.

But that’s exactly when we shook things up by introducing Bob and Lee, the gay househusbands. You gays should have loved them.

Yeah, I had read all about them right here at AfterElton.com, and what I read didn’t exactly make me want to pick up the show again. But I have to admit that when I sat down to watch this week’s episode for this week's Snark Attack, I was curious to see this gay couple for myself. Boy, were they even worse than I expected.