If there was ever a show that had a perfect start, it was Desperate Housewives. Not only was the first season amazing, but the first scene was as well, as we see Mary Alice Young playing the perfect housewife all the way until she pulls out a revolver and caps herself. Mrs. Huber, the woman who hears the blast is first to the scene, which is in a way ironic, as she is the person halfway responsible, and the next person to die. But of course, instead of Huber breaking down in tears, after calling the police, she rips the nametag of "Property of Mary Alice Young" off of the blender she borrowed but intentionally forgot to give back. Thus ended the first scene, something so perfect that it really encapsulated the show. Tragic incidents are met not with grief and with remorse, but with devious morality. Mary Alice Young died to give Desperate Housewives life. Of course, the show would come to bastardize itself in due time, but for one season, all revolving around this woman's suicide and the intricate web that surrounded it, it was great television.
Basing the pilot around the funeral of Mary Alice Young was a great way to introduce all of the main leads one by one. Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman) was up first, and in a brief cutaway sequence we meet a woman who was a career-first woman turned into scheming housewife, who shows that she still has her fastball by bribing her kids with a call to Santa (through her connection of "someone who knows someone who knows in elf") so they would behave, which of course, they won't. Next was Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria), who was introduced as having a taste for "Rich food and Rich Men", and her husband Carlos was introduced, and other than Rex Van de Kamp, he was the most involved husband in Season 1. Their squabble over Gaby being told to put into conversation the amount Carlos paid for her nacklace perfectly introduced a couple where materialism is on par with love. Bree Van De Kamp (Marcia Cross) was next, with her great basket routine, where she would give a person a basket of muffins, and say at the end that "of course, I will need those baskets back". I also loved the amazing expressions of Rex Van De Kamp behind Bree, gaping at the audacity of his husband to ask for the baskets back. Susan Meyer (Teri Hatcher) was last, and her cutaway quickly went through her marraige to Karl, which ends with him leaving her for his secretary. Julie is also introduced, and she was probably the most used kid in the series. Five minutes, four main characters introduced and characterized perfectly. That's how each show should start their run. We knew the characters, their lives and their personalities before the first ad break.
We return to the show with the first of many talks between the girls around the coffee table, this time with a flashback to when Mary Alice was alive and Susan had just found out Karl was cheating on her. Again, the characters were placed perfectly, Lynette with her head in her hands tired and filled with angst, while Bree was looking like she just returned from a relaxing day at the spa, despite both being tortured souls. When we return to the present, Gaby doesn't buy that Mary Alice had some serious demons, due to her nice family and home, and finishes by saying "No, if she had some problem, we would have known. She lives 50 feet away for God Sakes!" This moment also shows evidence of the only thing that is better today than in Season 1. Back then, Gaby was a really straight character, a person who was materialistic, selfish and naive, and Eva's acting helped pin that characterization down, as she wasn't nearly the comedic actress she is now. The acting feels a bit stiff, but that suited the cold woman Gaby was early on. Anyway, this then cuts to Paul Young, who up till now played the grieving husband, but here he has a pensieve look and slowly sips away at some scotch, a first sign of how deep and dark this suicide will become.
We then meet Mike Delfino, the man who would become the love interest as well as play a central figure in the mystery of the season, which is a tough task for one man to play, but James Denton played well. He basically completes the main cast (with few people yet to be met or focused, such as the Van De Kamp kids and Tom Scavo).
The first sign that this show would not be the ordinary women's drama is the following scene, where Julie pointedly asks Susan "Come on, how long is it since you've had sex?" after Susan scolds her for using tricks to finding information about Mike Delfino. Most shows would have had Susan get mad at her then 14-year old daughter bring up the sex question, but Susan responds "I'm just trying to remember." This show took different angles at sex issues, basically forgoing using that topic as a source of comedy but just as a source of story..... well, except for Edie, who would be introduced at the next scene at Mike's house. Another great example here of how the show used sex just as casually as How I Met Your Mother uses flashbacks, with the narration that Edie Britt 'was the enemy, and she was also a slut."
We then get two straight scenes into the eyes of the two marraiges that were doomed to fail: Carlos and Gaby and Rex and Bree. Carlos and Gaby first, with a beautiful couplet that again explains that while not seeming it from the outside, Carlos is as self centered and blinded by zeroes as his ex-model wife. Gaby claims that Tanka, Carlos' business partner, tries to cop a feel each time he meets Gaby, to which Carlos replies "I made over 200,000 doing business with that man last year. If he wants to grab your ass, you let him." It is amazing that six seasons later, and one divorce and remarraige later, this couple is now by far the strongest on the show, but back then, they were the classic cliche of beautiful woman and rich man multiplied by the fact that they were both increasingly shallow, and then raised a couple powers. After Gaby agrees, only after stating that "she will keep her back against the wall" Carlos leaves satisfied that he has a strong marraige full of compromise. Of course, the next scene is Gaby seducing and then having sex with John Rowland her teenage gardener (one bone to pick, it was almost impossible to imagine the John Rowland character as being 16, or the same age as Bree's daughter).
The next part was the Van De Kamp dinner, where Bree's kids don't appreciate her tireless effort to make them gourmet food for dinner. After a brief back-and-forth with her kids, who would rather have "food not cuisine", Bree calls upon her husband for support, and he gives it in the form of "Pass the salt" when asked to say something. We then go back to Gaby lying post-coitus with John in Bed, claiming that she still loves Carlos, and that basically John is something to keep her sane. Again, we see here the selfishness of Gabrielle.
We return to Rex and Bree going to a Western themed family restaurant for dinner, where Rex admits that he wants a divorce, that "he can't live in this detergent commercial anymore." In great Bree style she swallows her emotions perfectly, and without answering Rex, goes to make his salad, and subconciously puts onions in it, to which Rex has a major allergic reaction. Before the Bree story finishes, we get a scene where Zach Young (Mary Alice and Paul's son) awakens to the sound of Paul digging a hole into his empty pool, in search of "a family secret." Desperate Housewives did a great job in Season 1 of revealing parts of the mystery in slow exacting detail. All we gather in the pilot is that Paul is a shady character, and they were hiding something that Paul is now digging up. The whole mystery goes about ten layers deeper than that, but it is already a great hook.
In my favorite scene of the pilot, Rex and Bree are now in the hospital, where Rex starts of the conversation with "I can't believe you tried to kill me," and Bree almost laughingly replies "Yes, well, I feel sorry about that." Rex then proceeds to lay out all the reasons why he feels that he wants a divorce, basically calling Bree an emotionless, repressed shrew that cares only about the appearance of being perfect. Then of course, in emontionless, repressed, shrew style, Bree leaves without saying a word, before entering the restroom and breaking down, but emerged all smiles again. This scene said so much about the couple. Rex was still attached to what Bree used to be, but Bree felt that her role was now to be the perfect mother, not the perfect partner. This disconnect was later revealed to not be all that was wrong in their marraige, but it was a great start.
We get another scene with the Mike/Susan/Edie triumvarite, where Susan goes over to Mike's to ask him out, but is jarred to see Edie whoring it up there, and in her panic, tells Mike that she has a clog. To make herself, you know, actually have a clog, she stuffs Julie's school project of a popsicle-stick constructed trojan horse down the drain, which Julie defiantly agrees to, which gives us the best glimpse of this actual relationship. Julie is the responsible one, the good one, the real mother, and it is her job to always lend a hand to the mother in her pursuit of love, instead of the normal other way around.
The episode ends with Susan breaking into Edie's house because she thinks she is having Mike over, and knowing Edie's proclivity to bang anything that is attractive and has two legs, she feels scared. She only knows this information because Mrs. Huber told her. Mrs. Huber was also defined well in this pilot as the neighborhood gossip, as she has interactions with every housewife other than Gaby (who would, I don't think, ever share a one-on-one scene with her). Anyway, Susan enters Edie's house to noises of love-making. Then, being the klutzy kid she is, she knocks over some candles and sets fire to the house. It burns down after Susan flees, and then she approaches the group of ladies meeting outside the house after it burns down and plays the worried neighbor role. Thinking it was Mike that she was having sex with, Susan was depressed, until Mike showed up at the fire, and she brightened completely, all together forgetting that she had just burned down a woman's house. Off course, the episode ends with Mike making a shady phone call to an unknown guy, revealing for the first time that he isn't the all-american plumber.
Finally, there is a scene where the ladies drink champagne after sorting through Mary Alice's clothes. After realizing that she was a size 8 after claiming to always have been a size 6, Gaby says "I guess we found the skeleton in her closet." Just then, a letter falls out of the pile of clothes, which Bree reads. It simply states "I Know What You Did. It Makes Me Sick. I'm Going To Tell." The episode ends with Susan saying "Oh Mary Alice, what did you do?" as joyful music comes on and the camera pans away from the street, making parallel the terrors and mysteries of life with the whimsical nature of modern-day suburbia, a line the show would use each week.
The pilot episode was a great one. In a cast this big, it is amazing that each character was developed so much. Other than Tom Scavo (who had one season, and until initial positive testing was supposed to be a really minor character) and the Van De Kamp kids, we spent time with each character and learned quite a bit about them. The pilot also did a lot to set in motion a lot of plots without it seeming crowded. The Rex/Bree path to divorce would join the Mike/Susan/Edie romance and the Mary Alice suicide mystery all season long, and they were all introduced hear. Even the mystery was crafted carefully early, not revealing too much. I don't think anyone originally saw this and thought that Mary Alice's suicide was at all connected to Mike's shady phone call at the end, but they had everything to do with each other. The show was so interconnected in Season 1.
In the rest of the episodes, I'll talk about more of the art and the way of the show than give a rundown of what actually happened like I did with this one, but I felt for the pilot, which was largely an episode where each scene had a specific introductory purpose, it made sense. Plus, in a cast so big, it was good to give a little time to each character. So much on the show has changed since Season 1, and most of it for the worst. However, at that time, the show was a genuinely great hour of entertaining television. It will be a joy to relive it again, and share it with you.
ETC.....
= Bree's character is interesting. I far prefer the post-Rex Bree, where she gave up being an emotionally repressed woman, but her character in Season 1 was more layered and played better. I wouldn't want the old Bree back, but in a way, it was a lot more interesting to see her cope with the problems in her marraige while still portraying a calm serenity.
= It's hard to believe how much Julie grew through the show, or I should probably say Andrea Bowen, the actress that played her. I'm not sure if the Julie character was supposed to end up attractive (by all accounts, the Danielle Van De Kamp character was supposed to be the more attractive daughter of a housewife). If not, then it is another example of the Hermione Theory, where in long-term series involving child actors (or teen actors), a character who is not characterized as being attractive grows into being very attractive. It definitely happened with Emma Watson, and it also happened here with Andrea Bowen, who grew to be really beautiful.
= This show really has a large-picture negative view on marraige. The four main leads on the show have combined to be married 9 times. Five ended in divorce (Mike I, Carlos I, Karl, Victor Lang, Orson Hodge). One is currently separated (as in currently at the end of S7) in Tom. One ended in death (Rex), and the other two at least are there now (Mike II, Carlos II). It is a bit unrealistic, but in S1, all the marraiges were realistic. Bree/Rex was a classic case of growing apart over time. Carlos/Gaby was the aforementioned beauty and rich man. Lynette/Tom was the perfect match. Three different marriages, but all of them worked in their same way.
Next Up: 1-02: Ah, But Underneath.
