Desperate Housewives Review

The pilot begins with a housewife narrating her own suicide, and the tone is set at once. Marc Cherry's Wisteria Lane is a pastel suburb where the lawns are perfect and every basement hides something, played somewhere between satire, soap and Hitchcock. In its first season that blend is a genuine surprise, and critics greet it as one of the freshest things on network television, a mystery with jokes and a comedy with teeth.

The four leads carry it for eight years. Felicity Huffman's frazzled Lynette, the most grounded of them, won an Emmy; Marcia Cross turns Bree's brittle perfectionism into the show's best running tragedy; Teri Hatcher's clumsy Susan and Eva Longoria's spoiled Gabrielle supply the farce. Brenda Strong's dry narration from beyond the grave gives every episode a wry frame, and the lines are often sharper than the plots.

The plotting is the problem. The second season's mystery, with its prisoner in the basement, is a famous slump, and later years reach for a tornado, a plane crash, a five-year time jump and a parade of new neighbours with secrets to keep the machine turning. Critics warm to it again late on, and the final season sends the women off well. It never recaptures the first year, but it stays a glossy, witty entertainment.