Housewives and The Desperate Housewives

"Ah, yes: Wisteria Lane", the narrator would say. "The most charming of neighborhoods; the most flawless of characters; the most perfect of families; the most ideal of lifestyles." Oh, but beneath this facade, brews unhappiness, envy, and desire -petty drama and pointless conflicts of grave, unintended consequences.

The show begins with the suicide of an unhappy housewife. And every following episode of the show is a dramatized, comic social commentary of the archetypal, seemingly perfect, American family and way of life.
Let's start with Bree Van de Kamp - the stereotypical White, conservative housewife in the most traditional, suburban sense. Writers portray her as a super-housewife: cooking and baking gourmet dishes and pies, obsessively-compulsively neat and organized, materially caring for her husband and son.

She is and continues to be a stoic and depressed housewives like many claimed to have been by the 1960s. She fails to provide sexual care for her husband, and emotional care towards both her husband and son. Her husband, with his "naturally " sexual desires, turns to a prostitute, and leaves the wife. It is portrayed as a failure by Bree to satisfy the bread-winner of the family, and he threatens divorce. It is only after Bree reluctantly sacrifices her perceived rock-solid moral-righteousness and attempts taboo sexual practices with her husband that he returns to their superficial marriage. Sounds like the all too stereotypical marriage as highlighted in The Way We Never Were.

Ah, but there is more in store for Bree. The idea of Bree's all-American family continues to be challenged. One thing no one expects from a 1950s sitcom family is for a son or daughter to be sexually active and/or gay. The son and daughter, both highly promiscuous, intentionally flaunt their sexuality before Bree. Bree handles the situation badly and eventually abandons both her children. Her liquor in the linen closet into alcoholism when faced with the realities of domestic conflicts. While the drama is naturally exaggerated by Hollywood, the show's great themes about the realities corrupting the American housewife and family, permeate throughout the show.

Bree again challenges the traditional role of housewife when she becomes a successful caterer, cooking phenomenon, and a female icon; a Martha Stewart of sorts. She advocates tradition, female domesticity, and the return to "old-fashioned values". However, her work alienates her from friends and new husband Orson who has experienced a reversal of gender roles. He becomes enraged by frequently returning home to eat takeaways alone, and envious of his wife's success. After losing his job, Orson is so ashamed at his diminished role in the marriage that he fakes going to the office everyday to save face. (start video at 1:30) Orson later becomes evil when he successfully forces Bree to serve him "as a wife should", threatening her with blackmail if she focuses too much on her career.


Lynette Scavo, a housewife in her 40s with four children, has a load on her hands. She faces similar problems when she becomes the boss of her husband Tom and has to fire him. The husband, confused by his reversal of gender roles, starts a rampage of projects. Lynette calls it a mid-life-crisis. He starts a Pizzeria, band, working on an old car, and gets bored with taking care of the kids. The wife is thus put in nontraditional roles: being the bread-winner and standing up against her husband's desires/recklessness.

Always too exhausted after work, Lynette does not sexually cater to Tom after work. Tom frequently ventures out, and Lynette, after spying on him, is convinced he is cheating on her. So, Lynette is forced to start role-playing and cater to his fetishes in order to save the marriage. Lynette's worsening exhaustion means she longer can continue fulfilling the role of the housewife and breadwinner.

Lynette hides being pregnant from her boss out of fear of being fired and leaving her family without any income. She is discovered and fired, and confronts the difficult "reality" that a housewife with children can never be the breadwinner.

The former model, Gabriela Solis, has a nervous breakdown as she loses her beauty, sex appeal, and glamor after marriage. Susan Myer's failed marriages frequently leads to nostalgia and regret. The deeper one delves into these suburban characters, the more these hidden conflicts come to light.

Every character in the show plays their part in challenging and fulfilling the stereotypes of the traditional, suburban American family. The great theme of the show seems to be that housewives are unhappy with the traditional role of domestic servitude, but will always be unable to escape the role and the responsibilities that come with it.

Sitcoms and Moral Education

Oh, the memories from back home: sitting on sofas with the family, eyes peeled to the television, eyes tearing up from laughter.

Whether in black and white or Technicolor, the shows from my father's childhood are still funny today - hilarious in fact.
Oh, classic shows like...
I Love Lucy
Hogan's Heroes
Gilligan's Island
The Andy Griffith Show
The Beverly Hillbillies
My Three Sons
Michale's Navy
F-Troop
The Waltons
The Adams Family
The Brandy Bunch (even though that was a little later)
Red Skelton
Gunsmoke
Green Acres and its sibling
Petticoat Junction

These classic shows posses something that TV lacks today: family suitability. The humor, the lessons, the themes, are always good-natured and worthy of being respected. In every one of these shows, courtesy, decency, humility, and piety are always encouraged by the parental figures in the show. In Andy Griffith, childhood lessons about envy, diligence, honesty are consistently taught by Andy the father or Aunt Bee the caretaker to the more childish characters in an episode: Opie (Andy's son) and Barney Fife (Andy's Deputy). One episode stands out in my mind as an example of the moral education championed by these early shows.


"If we don't teach children to live in society today, what's going to happen to them when they grow up" justifies the moral education that permeates throughout this episode. 'Opie and the Spoiled Kid' served to teach hard work, respect for the law, respect for parents, personal responsibility, fiscal responsibility, while discouraging greed, dishonesty, and materialism.

Unlike the classic animated Disney movies of the 1990s, the audience of this show is not mainly comprised of children - but adults. The role cast by the delinquent boy's father, with his failure to educate his son, serves to impose upon adults a responsibility to educate and guide children or other people on a more "moral" path. The nature of the audience, combined with

The fact that this episode, of the dozens of Andy Griffith episodes, sticks in my mind most, I think is testament to the power of a fable when it becomes the dominant plot of a show like this.

I also remember an episode from Petticoat Junction, where two young men staying at the main characters' Bed&Breakfast Hotel try to rob a train. The heist fails when the safe is empty, and the family resumes normal life, ignoring the robbers trying to rob their house while holding the family at gunpoint. The episode concludes with a scene where the family, all gathered around the table at dinnertime, defends these "harmless, good-natured boys" from the sherriff. The family forgives them of their crimes, and the boys acknowledge their crime and respect the family for their forgivness, ending the episode on a note of "happily ever after".

It seems that everywhere one looks in these shows, moral education permeates. The main plots of episodes - where vengeful businessmen lose their job, German Commodants give in to mercy, or weird-looking Adams children stand up to bullying - defined and encouraged morality for an entire generation of American audiences.

I remember my father once rhetorically asked us: "aren't these shows different than what we see on TV today?" to which he answered "[the older shows] don't make us look at what's wrong with a shrug of acceptance. They make us see them as something that shouldn't happen and ought to be corrected." Such a generalization by nature does not apply to every show, but does highlight an important truth about the contrast between the purpose of these skits. Like the difference between a fable and non-fiction, the contrast lies between what should be, and what is. It provides a compass for action in fields beyond gender and family roles: our role as human beings in our corresponding communities.

Is it more that our communities have changed? ...that substance and human abuse, theft, and dishonesty are more prevalent? I would think not. But what has changed is the way in which humans visualize these elements: as inescapable elements of human nature and human life.