TV is the New Reading

‘Wives’ getting

a little desperate

Also, ‘Breaking Bad’ builds to a

jaw-dropping second-season finale

Ever since the fifth-season premiere of “Desperate Housewives,” I was sure we were going to learn something about that stop sign.

As Susan’s car goes barreling into an intersection and smashes into the car driven by Dave’s wife, killing her and her child and ultimately breaking up Mike and Susan’s marriage, it passes a downed stop sign.

Dave targeted Mike for revenge when he thought Mike was responsible for the death of his wife and child – he planned to murder Katherine out of revenge. Then he targeted Susan when he learned that she was the one driving. But I was anticipating one of the Scavo teens or something cutting the sign down on a goof and also becoming a target of Dave’s insane revenge fantasy.

Sunday’s two-hour fifth-season finale brought life on Wisteria Lane to an interesting place -- if somewhat familiar. Having agreed to take in Carlos’ niece, for instance, Gabby finds she’s got a hootchie-momma-in-training under her roof and she’s at sea as to how to deal with it.

The problem with that is that Gabby’s got a few years on this tart, she knows all the tricks and all of the emotional manipulation and is simply better at this than hootchie will ever be.

Lynette is preggers (again) with TWINS (again) and again that seems ever so unlikely. She’s just too fertile to share a bed, so surely by now both she and Tom have had ... procedures, yes?

Cliffhanger

Anyway, five years in, I’m supposed to be at all interested in a wedding cliff-hanger? Please, it’s so hard to believe that Karl would be allowed within 100 feet of Susan’s wedding so it’s gotta be Katherine -- even though Bree is already being sufficiently inappropriate for both of them. Seriously? Hooking up with the guy who sent your best friend into a multi-year shame spiral? Where’s the thought process behind that? It’s not going to hurt Orson in the slightest and it’s only going to be disgusting to anyone else who finds out and especially devastating to Susan.

Storylines like this, one imagines show creator Marc Cherry may simply be running out of ideas, and now the show is simply soapy sudsy spectacle beginning to end -- who’s together, who’s hooking up, who’s breaking up, who’s having a baby, who’s gay, who’s stark raving mad and so forth.

And again, since that’s been the show’s stock in trade since the pilot episode, maybe he’s not running out of ideas so much as characters to explore them with.

So I guess we’ll see who, in fact, is married to whom when “Desperate For Attention” returns for a sixth season next fall. And I guess we’ll also bear witness at that time what new magical technology will be brought to bear in applying makeup in high-definition.

‘Breaking Bad’

The countdown to the second-season finale of “Breaking Bad” finds high school chemistry teacher-turned-drug kingpin Walter White clinging desperately to the edge of success above a yawning chasm of failure.

Here’s why we care about him: He’s this Walter Mitty-type who is diagnosed with lung cancer after he collapses at his second job at the car wash. His son Chip, 16, has cerebral palsy and his wife, Skylar, is nine months pregnant with their “oops” baby.

When a local meth bust uncovers $700,000, White is transfixed. His expertise as a chemist is rolling right off the heads of his students when with just a little distillation here and some decanting there he can cook up the finest glass-grade crystal meth anyone has ever tweaked out on.

As of this week, White has hooked up with a high-volume distributor. While White races to meet a tight deadline in his first transaction with him, his partner, Jesse, gets zonked out on heroin. And when White breaks into Jesse’s place to get the meth, he gets a text from his wife that she’s about to give birth.

The show is so well done it’s easy to forget it’s fiction. Heading into the final two episodes of the second season, White finds himself in a desperately precarious situation with all the people in his life, and I for one am just as anxious to see how it all comes together.

“Breaking Bad” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on AMC.

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