AND HIS MOTHER GOES TO MEETINGS, WHILE HIS FATHER PULLS THE MAID: Uh, on a totally different note from the posts below, I’ve recently become addicted to Desperate Housewives. (Some spoilers for s2 follow.) I’ve only watched the first two seasons–and yeah, the second season is weaker than the first (more on that in a moment), but really, this is a great series. It’s really, really rare that I find a TV show–or really anything popular, sigh–that I think genuinely respects women. The women in DH are crazy people, yeah, but awesome crazy, in a way we can root for. I was kind of reminded of Absolutely Fabulous; which is pretty much my highest compliment. (OK, yes, AbFab is much better. That’s not the point.)

It’s also (and I don’t think this is unrelated) a deeply conservative show, at least in the first season. It’s bourgeois without being complacent. And it manages (again, more in the first season) to evoke empathy for people on both sides of real, painful conflicts. Even Andrew the sociopath and even Susan the child-woman (yeah, not a fan of hers) have a deep poignance and resonance. It’s a ferociously pro-motherhood and pro-marriage show, it’s moralizing in that noir way, and it takes religion (especially Catholicism, she noted with a fierce partisan nod!) very seriously. It’s also, and I’m not sure why it took me until now to mention this, totally hilarious. I would recommend at least the first season to everybody.

In the second season, some of the pacing is off. And the show decreases both its conservatism and its empathy. Sometimes the lessened conservatism really works–I think it’s part of what was going on in the tragically underutilized Bree-and-Justin sub-sub-subplot. And sometimes the lessened empathy works too–Sister Mary Hotpants was probably my favorite subplot of the entire second season, and she’s really just a villain. (ZOMG, the church catfight is better than chocolate!!!) She doesn’t have an inner life. But that’s okay because she’s hilarious and provokes a lot of fun, interesting stuff from the main characters. …But, and maybe I won’t be able to back this up if people challenge me on it, I felt like the first season was less willing to encourage viewers to root for the Wisteria Lane ladies against women in equally complex and vulnerable situations. The Solises’-birthmom storyline was the one where I really felt that most strongly: The birth mother is in a morally dubious, complicit, vulnerable position, not unlike Gaby Solis, so why is she a class-based caricature? Ugh.

Nonetheless. For the most part, this show is funny, sharp, and–I hate that this is so rare–actually in favor of, you know, women. And so I am in favor of it.