Desperate Housewives

“Desperate Housewives”

ABC Sundays 9/8 c

By Matthew Grayson

On ABC’s hit series “Desperate Housewives,” it’s the women who play hardball, and in the Oct. 22 episode, titled “Nice She Ain’t,” they try their hand at sabotage.

“Desperate Housewives” always begins with recently departed narrator Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong) introducing the episode’s theme and always ends, like any well-told story should, by revisiting this theme. However, rarely does an episode of “Desperate Housewives,” or any show, for that matter, carry its theme so expertly and so consistently throughout an entire hour of television as Sunday night’s installment of the award-winning series.

“Nice She Ain’t” weaves together five separate tales of sabotage into one finely crafted story arc full of twists and turns that always surprise but never go over the top. Though all the characters do live on Wisteria Lane, a fictitious but thoroughly convincing street in suburban utopia, “Desperate Housewives” finds far more clever means of transitioning from one home to another than simply hopping door to door. A shot from inside a microwave reveals character after character opening its door to retrieve his or her meal, usually leftover casserole or a TV dinner, until the microwave morphs into an oven, out of which Bree Hodge (Marcia Cross), a devilishly neurotic prude, pulls a beautifully cooked turkey.

Smart humor has always been the strong suit of “Desperate Housewives,” and this episode’s theme of sabotage not surprisingly lends itself to plenty of witty one-liners and hilarious situations. While Bree deals with her daughter’s affair with a teacher, Susan and Edie fight for Mike, who has woken up from his coma but is suffering from amnesia. A few houses - or rather microwaves - down, model-turned-trophy-wife Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria) comes home to find her husband Carlos (Ricardo Antonio Chavira) in a bathrobe with champagne in hand and assumes he’s still trying to seduce her out of their ongoing divorce. He tries to explain, but Gabrielle won’t hear him out. Only when she finds a blond bombshell in their bathtub does she get the picture.

Like any woman of Wisteria Lane would do, Gabrielle one-ups her husband in no time. Carlos comes home the next night to find her seducing Phil Lopez, who beat him out for Latino Businessman of the Year. When she can’t “pull the trigger” in bed, though, Carlos insists she still loves him and offers to bring her breakfast in bed. As Carlos opens the bedroom door the next morning, however, he finds her lying next to a random naked man, at which point she explains that they spent all night “pulling the trigger.”

Such surprises, though usually unpredictable, aren’t over the top or even hard to imagine. There’s a sense that what happens on “Nice She Ain’t” happens to someone, somewhere in real life. The characters are authentic, the dialogue is believable and the story lines (who can’t relate to sabotage?) seem like the highlights from a neighborhood’s collective memory—albeit one with a particularly grisly and scandalous past.

Perhaps that’s why series creator Marc Cherry chose such an anonymous name for the setting of “Desperate Housewives.” There are dozens of Wisteria Lanes across the country, each with its own fair share of skeletons in walk-in closets.