Desperate Housewives - Season 1 |VERIFIED|
The first season of Desperate Housewives, an American television series created by Marc Cherry, commenced airing in the United States on October 3, 2004, concluded May 22, 2005, and consisted of 23 episodes. It tells the story of Mary Alice Young, a seemingly perfect housewife who commits suicide, fearing that a dark secret, involving her, her husband, and their son would be exposed. At her wake, Mary Alice's four close friends and the main characters, Susan Mayer, Lynette Scavo, Bree Van de Kamp and Gabrielle Solis, are introduced. All of them live in the suburb of Fairview on Wisteria Lane. Narrating the series from the grave, Mary Alice describes how her friends try to find out the reason for her suicide, while trying to deal with the problems of their personal lives.
Desperate Housewives - Season 1
Marc Cherry wrote the script for the Housewives pilot and his agent appealed it to six networks, (CBS, NBC, Fox, HBO, Showtime and Lifetime) only to have all of them turn it down. Later, after his previous agent was arrested for embezzlement, he hired a team of new agents, who saw the script "as a soap opera with dark comedy in it".[13] After Cherry edited parts of the pilot script and pitched it to ABC, network executives were impressed, causing ABC to order 13 episodes.[13][14] Filming for the season started around March 2004 at the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot Colonial Street.[14][15]
This season was produced by Touchstone Television (now ABC Studios) and Cherry Productions and aired on the ABC network. The executive producers were Cherry, Michael Edelstein, Charles Pratt Jr., and Tom Spezialy with Pratt Jr., Chris Black, Oliver Goldstick, Joey Murphy, and John Pardee serving as consulting producers.[16] The staff writers were Cherry, Goldstick, Spezialy, Pardee, Murphy, and Black; producers Alexandra Cunningham, Tracey Stern, and Patty Lin; co-executive producer Kevin Murphy, Jenna Bans, David Schulner, Adam Barr, Katie Ford, and Joshua Senter.[16] Regular directors throughout the season included Charles McDougall, Arlene Sanford, Larry Shaw, Jeff Melman, Fred Gerber, David Grossman, and John David Coles.[16] Its orchestral score was composed by Steve Bartek and Steve Jablonsky, while the series' theme was composed by Danny Elfman.[16] Cherry also served as the season's show runner.[17]
Critical reception was overwhelmingly positive, and Housewives was considered the breakout hit of the season. Robert Bianco of USA Today gave the pilot a score of four stars out of four, calling it "[r]efreshingly original, bracingly adult and thoroughly delightful", and going on to say that "[Desperate] Housewives is a brightly colored, darkly comic take on suburban life, sort of Knots Landing meets The Golden Girls by way of Twin Peaks."[18] Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle thought that Desperate Housewives was "a brilliantly conceived and relentlessly entertaining new drama".[17] Matthew Gilbert of The Boston Globe commented that the series had "marvelous tonal elasticity".[34] Peter Schorn of IGN felt that season one was "blessed with an attractive cast (sing the praises of older women!), sharp writing and a funky vibe of its own" and that "Desperate Housewives was able to take some of the oldest formulas in the book and infuse them with their own subversive twists to whip up a frothy confection of sly wit and dark motives." Schorn gave the season a score of 9 out of 10.[35][36]
Some critics were not as enthusiastic, however. On reviewing the DVD release of the season, Entertainment Weekly's Dalton Ross gave it a B+ grade, selecting the pilot, "Who's That Woman?", "Guilty", "Children Will Listen" and the season finale "One Wonderful Day" as the season's best episodes, and "Suspicious Minds", "Your Fault" and "Love is in the Air" as the season's worst.[37] Heather Havrilesky of Salon.com felt that after a few episodes, "this dark exploration of the lives of women has not only slid quickly into clichés, but the acting feels forced and overplayed, the stories are wildly unrealistic, the direction is stuck in some awkward nowhereland between campy and leaden, and the voice-over is so grating and so peskily imitative of Sex and the City that the whole package is almost unwatchable."[38]
The first season of Desperate Housewives revolves around the desperate events and situations in the lives of the four main housewives: Susan, Lynette, Bree and Gabrielle as well as related characters. The season follows many themes such as romance, mystery, economic issues, crime and betrayal. This article contains episode summaries for the first season of Desperate Housewives.
Plot Synopsis: Gabrielle plans a big party to bid farewell to Carlos, who is about to head off to jail for eight months. Meanwhile George Williams resurfaces in Bree's life, much to Rex's displeasure as he knows George wants to steal her away from him. Also, Lynette is shocked to learn that Tom's old girlfriend Annabel Foster who he dumped for Lynette has been hired at his firm again. A desperate Lynette turns to Edie for advice on how to deal with the situation. Susan and Julie encounter less-than-neighborly behavior from the Young family as Zach continues to stalk Julie. Paul interrogates Edie about breaking into his house, and she ends up telling him that Susan was behind it. Paul decides to lie to Susan again in order to cover.Mike tries to separate Susan from Mary Alice's past secrets. Lastly, housewife Gabrielle is suspecting that she's pregnant. She's also looking to buy a new car, which doesn't go so well while at the dealership which begins her suspicions. When finding out that Carlos tampered with her birth control pills Gabrielle retaliates in rage.
Plot Synopsis: In the first season finale, Bree and Rex make amends but tragedy hits the Van De Kamp family again, Zach learns what happened to his father, Edie meets the new residents of Wisteria Lane, Gabrielle testifies for Carlos, Tom decides what to do with his life - and his wife's, Susan is held hostage and the reasons to why Mary Alice Young commited suicide are finally revealed.
This time 10 years ago, five suburban women became the centerpiece of a major television comeback story. The show was "Desperate Housewives," and its mothership, ABC, had been sinking rapidly in the years before. After the prime-time iteration of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" ended in 2002, the network had few, if any, banner shows to tout. Flagship dramas "The Practice" and "NYPD Blue" suffered sagging ratings, and a trove of unremarkable sitcoms ("8 Simple Rules," "My Wife and Kids," "George Lopez") did little to bolster any ascent. The reality swell was settling in ("The Bachelor," "The Bachelorette," "Extreme Makeover," "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"), but without a behemoth like "Survivor" or "American Idol," the network didn't have much to keep it afloat. The nadir came with the 2003-04 season, when ABC was toppled in the ratings by NBC, CBS and Fox.
The network was gasping for air as the quadruple threat of "Desperate Housewives," "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy" and "Boston Legal" took over in fall 2004 and spring 2005. When "Lost" premiered on Sept. 22, its reported $14 million pilot was one of the costliest in TV history. The 18.7 million viewers who tuned in also lent the network its strongest numbers since "Millionaire" in 2000. But one week later, another series stampeded over Oceanic Flight 815's fortune. Even though "Lost" has secured a firmer legacy in the television canon, it was "Desperate Housewives" that was the season's defining breakout. Premiering to a remarkable 21.3 million viewers on Oct. 3, the show boasted ABC's most popular pilot since the Michael J. Fox-fronted "Spin City" premiered in 1996. A pop-culture moment was born.
Watching a pack of women shed their suburban facades behind closed doors week after week felt novel, largely because the comedic undertones set it apart from ennui-laden cinematic counterparts like "American Beauty" and "The Ice Storm." Every "Housewives" subplot carried nearly the same weight as the mystery surrounding Mary Alice Young's (Brenda Strong) suicide, from Lynette battling a PTA mother over a politically correct "Little Red Riding Hood" production to Susan and Edie battling each other over their infatuations with a new neighbor, Mike Delfino (James Denton). In fact, it was those infatuations that gave way to what is perhaps the season's most memorable scene outside of the pilot: Susan smashing her head after trying to convince Mike she ventured to a cowboy bar for the mechanical bull instead of his purported entanglement with another woman.
Fox seemed to understand the potential of Sunday nights as a home for signature shows, but NBC, CBS and ABC for years peppered their lineups with movies and unscripted fare. By the start of the 2000s, HBO -- which, coincidentally, turned down creator Marc Cherry's spec script during the "Desperate Housewives" development process -- had staked claim on Sundays: "Oz," "Sex and the City," "The Sopranos," "Six Feet Under," "The Wire" and other darlings earned the network's Sunday night placement. Others were slowly catching on, but it was the 2004-05 season, when "Desperate Housewives" became the year's fourth most-watched program and ushered in sizable lead-in audiences for, first, "Boston Legal" and, later, "Grey's Anatomy," which transitioned Sunday toward the entertainment goliath it is today.
The fact that "Desperate Housewives" didn't maintain the same quality throughout the rest of its eight-season tenure yet still finds good favor a decade later is a testament to the strength of its inaugural season. As is the case with many female-fronted casts ("The Golden Girls," "Sex and the City," "Designing Women," "Charmed"), the press jumped all over stories of on-set brawls, melodramatic photo shoots and co-stars' resentments. But if anything, the show stalled because its premise couldn't sustain itself across numerous seasons. Cherry and the writers wrapped up the Mary Alice mystery at the end of Season 1, meaning they had to introduce a new hook for Season 2. That gave way to an overwrought plot that involved Alfre Woodard keeping her mentally challenged son chained up in her basement. 041b061a72