GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Nip/Tuck is gone until next year....what is there to watch in it's place?

Quote:

Originally posted by Heather Hamptons
Anyone here watch Dr. 90210? That ones pretty good too.

Well, Desperate Housewives is on Sundays..and I double checked, ABC will be airing the first episode this Saturday @ 10PM. If you like a black comedy with a twist of mystery, this show is for you.

ABC's "Desperate Housewives," the season's most promising new series (premiering Sunday, Oct. 3), starts off with a bang.
It's a gunshot that snuffs out the life of Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong), a perfectly groomed suburban housewife whose seemingly ideal life turns out to have been a masterfully applied gloss over some painful and embarrassing secrets.

Mary Alice's suicide rocks her immaculately manicured neighborhood and stuns her circle of close friends: Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher), a divorced single mom hungry for a little romance; Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), formerly a top business executive, now a frazzled wife and mom to four young kids tap-dancing on her last nerve; Bree Van De Camp (Marcia Cross), a Martha Stewart on crack whose obsessive perfection is driving her husband (Steven Culp) over the edge; and Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria), an ex-model who is cheating on her wealthy husband (Ricardo Antonio Chavira) with John (Jesse Metcalfe), her teenage gardener.

And don't get them started on Edie Britt (Nicollette Sheridan), the man-eating divorcee who lives just up the street from these ladies.
From that brief synopsis -- which, by the way, barely skims the surface of even the first episode -- "Housewives" sounds like an over-the-top soap opera. But as created by Marc Cherry ("The Golden Girls"), this new series dances confidently if improbably from one genre to another. First and foremost, it's wickedly funny, with perhaps the highest laugh ratio per hour anywhere on this fall's network TV schedule.

Yet there are also undercurrents of poignancy, mystery, suspense, romantic comedy -- you name it, you'll probably find it in "Housewives," although somehow it works, thanks both to the deft writing and dazzling performances of its ensemble cast.

"I call it 'American Beauty' meets 'Six Feet Under' meets 'The Stepford Wives,'" says Huffman, the "Sports Night" alumna whose exhausted mom Lynette is likely to become one of the show's real breakout characters.

"We're pretty strict (as a society) about how to be a mother, especially these days," says the actress, who has two preschool children with her husband, actor William H. Macy ("Fargo").

"There's the stay-at-home mom, where it's incredibly fulfilling and it's exactly what you've always wanted to do with your life and you've never wanted to do anything else. And then there's the career mom, which at this point seems to be looked down upon a little.

"But no one talks about the woman who chose to stay home with her kids and is now going crazy, and has lost her sense of self and just doesn't love it all the time, finds it overwhelming at least some of the time. There is nothing harder than raising kids. A corporate job is a cakewalk by comparison, and I love giving a voice to the magnitude and the difficulty of motherhood."

Marcia Cross, who reached giddy heights of black comedy as the deranged Kimberly Shaw Mancini on "Melrose Place," says that out-of-control character was a walk on the beach compared to the juggling act she is called upon to do as the hyper-perfectionist Bree in "Housewives."

"This is the hardest part I've ever played," she sighs. "Even within the context of the show, Bree is one of the more heightened characters, and there are days when I walk away thinking, 'Oh my God, was that too much?' Yet if I relax it down, it's not really her. To be safe is wrong for Bree, so I have to walk that dangerous line.

"I lie in bed tossing and turning, going, 'You're not doing this' or 'You're not doing that,' because this thing is kind of its own genre. Sometimes it touches the depths of your soul, while other times it's almost blatantly high comedy, still others black comedy. It's a little more like real life, only very heightened."

Cherry says the original seed for this new series originally took root a few years ago, while he and his mother were watching TV coverage of the trial of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her children in the bathtub.

"I turned to her and I said, 'Can you imagine a woman being so desperate that she would hurt her own children?' And my mother took her cigarette out of her mouth and said, 'I've been there.'"

Cherry's mother then recounted the mini-breakdowns she herself had suffered while trying to raise three children alone while her husband was away at college.

"Suddenly it occurred to me, 'Well, gosh, if my mom has these moments, every woman has had a moment where she is close to losing it," Cherry says. "As I talked to her and found out these things, the genesis of this idea was born in that."

"Marc Cherry walks a thin line of between reality and heightened reality, sarcasm, a little wickedness," Huffman says. "It's not a voice I have encountered before on TV, and finding it put in service to these incredible female characters is just an amazing experience for all of us."

As lonely single mom Susan Mayer, Hatcher, whose recent TV appearances have been limited mainly to Radio Shack commercials, gives the kind of revelatory performance that moves any actress to a completely new career level. The former star of "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" says she and her co-stars feel like members of a happy ensemble, rather than a group of competitive actresses jockeying for the spotlight.

"It's wild to have times when you can't get an audition to save your life, ... and then you get lucky enough to end up in an incredible piece of material like this with all these incredibly strong, powerful, unique women," Hatcher says. "I couldn't be more grateful.

"And the great thing about it is, there is no 'lead.' Each character is so strongly written and so defined in her character arc and behavior that there's just enough pieces of pie for everybody."