Rinse cycle Desperate Housewives gets lost in the wash BY JOYCE MILLMAN

For months before the October 3 launch of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, we were bombarded with commercials, newspaper ads, and billboards featuring the show’s five lead actresses in glam poses. (The tag line promised lots of "dirty laundry.") The hype paid off: the debut episode brought in a whopping 21.6 million viewers and was the highest-rated show of the week. After just two episodes had aired, Oprah had the cast on her show and Entertainment Weekly put them on the cover. Are we that starved for non-reality television that a show slapped together from the leftovers of better, iconic works of pop culture is hailed as the greatest thing since the microwave oven?

Well, yes. Created by former Golden Girls writer Marc Cherry, Desperate Housewives is a garish, surreal soap/comedy/drama/murder mystery starring some familiar faces of prime times past (Teri Hatcher of Lois & Clark, Marcia Cross of Melrose Place, Nicollette Sheridan of Knots Landing) and daytime, too (Eva Longoria of The Young and the Restless). The show is set on pristine Wisteria Lane in Anysuburb, USA, where women stay at home and bake muffins or tend to their children.

But beneath the idyllic surface, there are — sshhhhhhhh — secrets. Perfect wives are having affairs; perfect moms are loathing motherhood. Unfulfillment and simmering anger hang in the air. And one of the housewives, Mary Alice (Brenda Strong), has committed suicide; she now hovers around as the off-camera narrator watching everyone try to figure out why she did it. There’s an anonymous note found among her belongings ("I know what you did. You make me sick.") that might have driven her over the edge. And there’s a hunky new guy on the block who might be after what’s in the toy chest Mary Alice’s husband dug up from under the swimming pool.

The candy colors and the manicured sameness of Wisteria Lane echo Tim Burton’s ghoulish suburbia in Edward Scissorhands, but the show has none of Burton’s facility for being at once ironic and utterly heartfelt. Desperate Housewives also makes an attempt at John Waters–style campy social satire: Cross does a scarily frozen-smiled turn as a Martha Stewart wanna-be, and the two nastiest people on the block, nosy neighbor Mrs. Huber (Christine Estabrook) and town tramp Edie (Sheridan), are self-proclaimed Christians. But the show lacks the guts and the imagination to sharpen the stick and drive the point home. If it’s fearless outrageousness you’re after, try the vastly more entertaining Nip/Tuck, the best, purest nighttime soap since the heyday of Dynasty and Dallas. (FX is rerunning the series from the beginning Sundays at 10 p.m.)

I had hopes for Desperate Housewives as an over-the-top but empathetic commentary on female angst and despair after I read Cherry’s remark about where he got his inspiration — his mother admitted that she could sympathize with Andrea Yates, the Texas housewife who drowned her five kids in a bathtub. But the show is more cute than disturbing. It wants to portray its heroines as complex people with good qualities and bad, but the overriding tone here is one of simplistic coyness. Why is Cross’s perfectionistic Bree so icily emotionless? Because no one ever says thank you for all the hard work she does around the house! Why does Longoria’s Gabrielle cheat on her husband? Because he’s a macho jerk who’s never home! Desperate Housewives doesn’t want to alienate the women who make up its target audience, so it condescendingly softens its edges. When things begin to stray into harsh territory — say, when overburdened mother of four Lynette (Felicity Huffman) orders her uncontrollable sons out of the mini-van and drives away — the irresponsibility and the frustration of her actions are quickly replaced by sight gags. In this one, the boys bite and kick the pudgy do-gooder lady who finds them and wants to report their mother to social services.

I would say that Desperate Housewives offers a cartoonish portrait of lonely, bored, stressed-out women living lives of un-quiet desperation, but I don’t want to insult TV’s original desperate housewife, Marge Simpson. Marge may be a real cartoon, but she’s more human, touching, and true-to-life funny than the women of Wisteria Lane will ever be.