Mothers of suburbia

It has been described as desperate viewing for American women seeking a new Sex and the City . Following the end of the hit comedy earlier this year, Desperate Housewives is filling the vacuum for Sunday-night viewers in the States - replacing four strong, sexy, sophisticated singles in New York City with four stressed-out married or divorced women trapped in an affluent, suburban cul-de-sac, otherwise known as Wisteria Lane.

But the sexual forays and social observations of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte in Sex and the City, shown on the high-brow subscription cable channel HBO, were witty and cerebral in comparison to the outlandish antics of four cliched, coiffed and coutured stereotypes, otherwise known by nearly 22 million viewers as Gabrielle, Susan, Lynette and Bree, on ABC network TV's take on 'sex in the suburbs'.

Where one show provided something in the way of intelligent social commentary, as well as a bit of trashiness, this is just trashiness, delicious though it may be. Its appeal is simple: women taking comfort from seeing that even rich, beautiful women who 'have it all' are really only one shopping spree away from breakdown.

Desperate Housewives, which starts on Channel 4 in January, is American TV's number 1 show and the most popular new drama since ER began 10 years ago. Creator and writer Marc Cherry says it is meant to be a dark parody of upper-middle-class suburban manners and mores, to satirise the dark side of what is supposed to pass for the American dream.

'If it's a gorgeous fantasy neighbourhood with nice cars and nice houses and pretty people, the darkness of their actions will seem more fun,' claims Cherry.

The show made its October debut with an intriguing start: a seemingly perfect suburban mother blowing her brains out - after tidying the house, of course - and revealing she kept a deep, dark secret. We still don't know Mary Alice's secret, but there's plenty to keep America hooked among the stressed-out survivors on that manicured cul-de-sac: sexual subterfuge, repressed rage, blackmail, betrayal, public humiliation, oh, and some naked men falling out of windows, naked women falling in bushes, brewing catfights, and lots of other inanely silly suburban madness committed by perfect bodies with too much time on their hands, but plenty of psychoses to keep them busy.

Think of it as an existential soap: Ally McBeal meets Dynasty meets Melrose Place, with a little Twin Peaks surreal suburban noir thrown in.

It's only been on the air a few weeks and already it's a pop-culture phenomenon, capturing the sort of glossy magazine covers, newspaper column inches, daytime TV talk show and talk radio buzz once claimed by both Sex and the City and Ally McBeal. Its stars are the talk of the tabloids, their lives and views on careers, marriage and motherhood now gossip fodder. Desperate Housewives has prompted the latest round of hand-wringing talk about 'what women really want'.

Time magazine's TV critic James Poniewozik wrote: 'ABC's dark-humoured soap suggests that all is not well on Venus in 2004 - and that you underappreciate women at your peril, in TV and in life.' When Oprah Winfrey invited the Desperate cast on her show, with its audience of millions of stay-at-home mothers, she declared the show a mirror of American women's 'real-life quiet desperation'. Oprah praised the characters' 'realism', and talked about real-life examples: a perfectionist driving her family nuts, a bored housewife having an affair.

Fortunately, many others take it for what it really is: an excuse to lie back with a glass or three after the children have gone to bed and escape the real-life dramas that come with work, relationships and motherhood.

'Do I identify with any of these characters? God no,' says Wendy Feliz Sefsaf, a Washington DC PR and fundraising expert who is a married mother of a six-year-old boy. 'I don't know anyone in my suburb who looks like that, let alone acts like that... well, maybe the former career mum with four kids and issues with the PTA committee. Oh, and that anal housewife. But no, this is just total escapist fun.'

There's the pseudo 'Stepford Wife' Bree (Marcia Cross), a control freak whose husband wants a divorce; frazzled Lynette (Felicity Huffman), the frustrated mother of four out-of-control children who wishes she had never given up her career; hot tempered siren Gabrielle (Eva Longoria), an under-appreciated housewife who's fooling around with the 17-year-old gardener while warring with her mother-in-law; and lovelorn Susan (Teri Hatcher), a hot but unhappy single mother desperate for a man, who takes dating advice from her teenage daughter.

'Ultimately, what's at the core of the show is that you have to be careful about the choices you make in life,' says 42-year-old Cherry, who used to write for The Golden Girls . He told entertainment reporters recently that his inspiration for the series had been his mother, who he thought was always perfectly in control until she confessed later in life that she, too, had had desperate moments. 'Choosing to be a housewife, mother or wife - these are iconic roles society puts on women and then expects them to be happy with. But what happens when a woman puts on one of these labels, adopts the lifestyle and still isn't happy?'

Anecdotal evidence from girlfriends sharing the latest juicy plot lines at the water cooler on Mondays suggests there is at least some grain of truth in the bitchy caricatures. 'Sure it rings some bells, but it's still fluffy, mindless fun,' says Jessica Blake Hawke, 38, a stay-at-home mother from Washington's leafy Glover Park neighbourhood. Blake Hawke gave up a promising career in social work to care for her three-year-old girl and six-year-old boy.

'I don't really identify with any of the characters,' says Blake Hawke, 'but there is Lynette, the only happily married woman in the bunch, who's frazzled and frustrated by that crazy hierarchy of stay-at-home mums trying to out-achieve each other making costumes and baking cookies. But I'm still embarrassed to admit I've watched every episode so far. I have a masters degree!'

It was easy to share a laugh with other mothers when Lynette, the most three-dimensional of the characters, asks another stay-at-home mum how she manages - and the woman reaches into her bag and brings out her child's medicine for attention-deficit disorder. 'Isn't that supposed to calm you down?' asks Lynette. 'No, it has the opposite effect if you don't have ADD,' says the hyped-up woman about the latest line of mothers' little helpers. Popping the ADD pills is how Lynette later gets the costumes made for the school play.

Felicity Huffman, the actress who plays stressed-out Lynette, says she understands her character's conflicting feelings about leaving a high-powered job for the less glamorous role of suburban mother. 'Motherhood was the last icon in America,' says Huffman, who has two small children with her actor husband William H Macy. 'There's one way to be a mother, and that's basically to go, "I find it so fulfilling, and I've never wanted anything else, and I love it." And if you do anything that diverges from that, you're considered a bad parent. I didn't know this existed until I became a mother, and the pressure is phenomenal.'

But Desperate Housewives is far from empowering. Martha Lauzen is a communications professor at San Diego State University who compiles an annual study of women's employment in television. 'It pits women against women, competing for what else? Men. It shows women as petty, self-centred, and scheming.'

Susan Reimer, feminist and family columnist for the Baltimore Sun newspaper, went further. She says Desperate is the 'newest reason for Muslims to hate us'. Reimer bemoans the stereotypes: 'One Martha Stewart, one hot- tempered Latina, one predatory divorcee, one hapless but sympathetic divorcee and a passive, defeated former career woman overrun by her children.'

Christian conservatives, that block of voters that put George W Bush back in the White House, are not amused either. They say the characters and explicit dialogue are just too racy for primetime television. Pressure from the religious right has forced a number of big advertisers to drop their ads. Thousands of members of the American Family Association, which last made headlines protesting against the single mother on Murphy Brown and homosexuality on Ellen, bombarded five of the primetime soap's advertisers with emails and phone calls, and when meat processor Tysons, cereal giant Kellogg and home- improvement chain Lowe's were among those to drop their sponsorship, the conservative group declared victory.

Though rates for a 30-second advertising spot now top $300,000, no one else is dropping out: the audience is biggest among the 18-34 demographic advertisers crave. Many see women of a 'certain age' as a growing and untapped female market. And all this for a series that almost didn't get made: Cherry says networks NBC, Fox, CBS and cable channels HBO and Family all rejected his drama-soap. Now the once lagging ABC is winning the battle of Sunday night ratings.

But even Desperate Housewives fans admit the phenomenon could have more to do with what's on the other networks. Feliz Sefsaf admits: 'There's no Sex and the City any more, no Sopranos or Six Feet Under on right now. Something better comes on and, well, I'll be back with HBO.' Blake Hawke says: 'I started watching it only because Law and Order: Criminal Intent is getting too grisly. Besides what else is there to do when you're folding laundry?'

· Desperate Housewives starts on C4 in January

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