DVD REVIEW: DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES – SEASON 3

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SPECIAL FEATURES:
• “On Set With Eva” featurette
• “Here Comes The Bride” featurette
• “Amas De Casa Desperadas” featurette
• “Desperate Moments” featurette
• “Cherry Picked: Marc Cherry’s Favorite Moments”
• Deleted scenes
• Bloopers


The Pitch

Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross, Eva Longoria, Nicolette Sheridan, James Denton, Ricardo Chavira, Doug Savant, Kyle MacLachlan, Dougray Scott, Brenda Strong.

It really was a shame to have to dump Eva off in the desert like this, but a man can only take so much bitching…

The Nutshell

The Lowdown

If you happened to catch my Season 2 Extra Juicy Edition review (here) of this show, you know that Desperate Housewives is a ratings juggernaut that has revived and jumpstarted not only the careers of all involved, but also catapulted ABC from the Nielsen toilet into being a contender again. It’s the show about five women who live on the fictional Wisteria Lane, where everything that’s possibly weird can and does happen on a regular basis. Lost and 24 is probably the most heavily serialized show on primetime. There are plot twists wrapped inside stories contained by sagas vacuum sealed within plot devices running 100 miles a minute on this show. And if you blink, you’re sure to miss the fact that somebody had sex with someone who was then murdered by an alleged acquaintance of the daughter of a friend of said somebody.

General Zod, Feral Akodon: I’ve made my decision…

The first of the five housewives is of course Susan (Hatcher), a divorced single mother of a daughter who was nailing the nephew of one of the other housewives, Edie (Sheridan) and briefly menaced by the creepy illegitimate son, Zach (Cody Kasch) of Susan’s former boyfriend, Mike (Denton), who happened to be put into a coma by the new husband, Orson, of another of the housewives, Bree (Cross), who, along with Susan was a friend of another housewife, Mary Alice, the dead narrator, who was the illegal adoptive mother of the aforementioned creepy illegitimate son of the previously referenced Mike. Susan spent the majority of Season 3 pining away for Mike as he languished in a six-month coma as a result of Orson running him down to prevent Mike from revealing a secret from Orson’s past that he’d rather no one be privy to. While thus engaged, Susan meets and reluctantly begins a relationship with Ian (Dougray Scott), a Scottish millionaire whose wife has likewise been riding a slumber bed for the better part of three years. Things are complicated (well, more complicated) when Susan falls in love with Ian just as Mike suddenly awakens from the coma with amnesia and they eventually become embroiled in a love triangle, oh my.

"Before we do this, I just need to let you know that I have a huge scar on my scalp from my brain surgery and I once tried to burn down my apartment complex."
"That’s okay, I’m really an alien cop pursuing another alien who likes to jump bodies."
"Okay, just so long as we’re clear on what we’re getting into here…"

Lynette (Huffman) has been juggling a couple of crises this past season. First, she is still dealing with the aftermath of her husband Tom’s (Savant) pre-marriage dalliance with a crazy chick, Nora (Kiersten Warren) who produced a daughter, Kayla, he didn’t know about until the end of the previous season. Not only is Nora a clingy, troublesome bitch, the kid isn’t much better. When said clingy troublesome bitch is killed in a grocery shooting, Tom and Lynette take the girl into their home and she picks up causing Lynette headaches where her dead mommy left off. Meanwhile, Tom and Lynette are in hock up to their hair follicles trying to get Tom’s pizzeria off the ground. What’s worse is that Lynette, who had been feeling lonely and stressed, begins a flirting relationship with the pizzeria’s new manager they hired when Tom threw his back out and was bedridden. Lynette never got horizontal with the handsome manager, but his affections made her feel pretty, as we all certainly need to feel now and then I’m sure. And of course the season is topped off by Lynette discovering she has breast cancer.

"I gotta tell you, Ian, it’s really been hard for me to see you and Susan together since I came out of my coma."
"You wanna talk hard, mate, try making it look like Tom Cruise could take you in a fight. That’s bloody hard…"

Easily the most juicy goings-on center around Bree, who had just married Orson, the handsome dentist who wooed her last season after her bout with alcoholism. Turns out Orson has not a skeleton but an entire boneyard in his closet when it’s revealed that his first wife, Alma (Valerie Mahaffey) had disappeared years before and is presumed dead, and then Orson’s previous other woman, Monique, turns up in a shallow grave, with suspicion squarely on Orson’s head for both deaths. Mike knew about Orson and Monique, which was why he was treated to a front bumper French kiss by Orson at the end of Season 2. Of course it’s then revealed that Alma is in fact alive and has been hiding out for years and her and Orson’s marriage was a loveless one insitgated by Alma’s getting pregnant and nothing else.

"You’re sure this doesn’t appeal to you, Senator Craig?"

Alma shows up and is even more of a scheming, clingy bitch than Nora was for Lynette. What’s worse, she’s scheming with Orson’s mother Gloria (Dixie Carter) to get Bree out of the picture so she and Orson can get with the baby making in wedded bliss again. Oh and Bree meanwhile has to track down her homeless son, Andrew (Shawn Pyfrom), whom she threw out in Season 2 for trying to drive her crazy just to get his hands on his trust fund. To top things off, her daughter, Danielle (Joy Lauren), who was screwing her high school teacher, not to mention Edie’s nephew, gets pregnant and Bree ships her off to a convent and then honeymoons with Orson. When Bree returns, she’s “pregnant”, but not really, all in an eventual attempt to pass off Danielle’s impending oven bun as her own to spare her daughter (and more importantly herself) the embarrassment.

Uh, I gotta check to see if my HMO covers this…

Meanwhile, Gabrielle (Longoria) has finalized her divorce from Carlos (Chavira) and is back on the singles scene. She’s pursued not only by Zach, who by the way whacked his dying grandfather in order to get his inheritance of billions and has now become a self-centered rich little creep – whereas he was a self-centered middle class little creep before – she’s also pursued by Victor Lang (John Slattery), a rich businessman who is running for mayor. Their relationship is one of avoiding scandals, such as being photographed having sex in an elevator right in the middle of a campaign, and also Gaby trying to flex her newly-elected power as the mayor’s wife by getting out of parking tickets she gets on purpose. Plus it turns out her husband might be of the crazy type when he has some of his boys beat the shit out of the parking enforcement officer who inadvertently bruised Gaby’s wrist when she attacked him.

Thoughts from the girls at Eva Longoria’s recent wedding to Tony Parker:
Huffman: "Lucky bitch."
Cross: "Lucky tramp."
Hatcher: "So about how long until he’s available?"

By comparison to all of this, things are relatively simple for Edie. All she’s doing is trying to get Carlos to fall in love with her by using her son that she disavowed years before to prey upon Carlos’ desire to have children. When she decides to con Carlos into thinking that she wants to have children, and then having him discover that she lied to him about not being on the pill anymore and having him dump her, she decides to indoor bungee jump by her neck in the season finale. Is she dead? Stay tuned.

Desperate Housewives, by all accounts is still hitting on all eight cylinders, creatively and ratings-wise. If you’ve never seen it and are thinking of picking this set up (yeah I know you’re not, but I had to put it out there), let me warn you to first go get the first two seasons, otherwise your response to the goings on of this set every episode are gonna be, “Huh?”. Desperate Housewives is as serialized as Trix and you have little to no hope of keeping up if you haven’t been there from day one. I actually have been and sometimes I still got to ask the wife, “Huh?”. Hell it’s because of her that I even started watching this soap factory in the first place. If you were the type that could check your brain at the door for stuff like Melrose Place or Dynasty, you’ll probably like this show. Just be prepared to take notes.

"So Susan, now that I’ve joined your family and what’s yours is mine, that includes the daughter, right?"

The Package