TV is the New Reading

‘Desperate Housewives’ leaps ahead five years

My ‘Wives are looking even better for their age, now that the storylines for “Desperate Housewives” have time-leapt five years into the future.

I didn’t think this was going to work. For example: It really doesn’t matter what kind of shapeless thing you drape over Eva Longoria, it’s hard for her not to look amazing. But what it mostly did was relax the need for makeup to look exactly the same from one season to the next because people do age and high-definition television is unforgiving.

And Edie Britt’s “return” at the top of the show allowed for some delightful exchanges.

Edie: “I have a husband now.”
Susan: “Really? Whose?”

and

Edie: “What the hell happened to you?”
Gaby: “I had two children.”
Edie: “What ... for breakfast?”

In the fifth season premiere, some of the storylines from last season are resolved with flashbacks, while some trundle merrily forward on their own. For example, Lynette’s children have all been recast and – now in their teens – they’re still completely out of hand. Lynette tracked them to the pizza place and found them at the center of a drunken casino-themed party. Her attempts to punish them are undermined by her husband, who is 100 percent behind their antics until they take place in his restored convertible.

Gaby is struggling with motherhood, and some early body-image issues with her 4-year-old daughter. “She ate half a sheet cake!” she frets to her husband, Carlos. “They couldn’t find all the candles!”

Flashbacks

With her daughter, Julie, out of the picture, and a separation with Mike, Susan is carrying on an ongoing meaningless affair with her painter. As to how this came to be, we have only the most obscure glimpses. There was a car accident that killed a stranger. Mike was thrown from the car and both he and Susan survived, but Susan was apparently really freaked out by it, so she and Mike separated.

However, there are a few juicy little clues. The fatal collision took place at an intersection where the stop sign had been knocked down. Also, there’s a dent in Lynette’s minivan, and a dark suggestion that the boys are responsible for putting it there. Hmmm ...

Also, Bree and Katherine’s catering business has translated into a cooking show doing a segment on a cookbook Bree is publishing, in which she takes credit for some of Katherine’s prize recipes. Their squabble culminates in a challenge for Bree to recreate one of Katherine’s techniques for the cooking segment and she fails. More to the point, however, in another flashback, her daughter, Danielle, reclaimed her child, who Bree was raising as her own.

Together with the flashbacks, and Edie returning with a creepy new husband, there was a lot going on in Sunday’s season premiere of “Desperate Housewives” – some of it a little bit confusing. However, with a whole season’s worth of new intrigue and scandal in suburbia, appointment television is back, Sundays at 8 p.m. on ABC.

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