It is that time of year again, a time for good cheer and bad television.
But this season holiday specials face hefty competition in the battle
for most contemptible programming. This is not a reference to locker
room nudity on a Monday night although, like most Canadians, this smug
Northerner takes supreme pleasure in events that result in a heated
debate of American family values. Heaven forbid a fifty-year old woman
expose her backside when thirty or more steroid dependent Neanderthals
wait sideline to pummel the living bejesus out of one another.

No. The despicable program in question is a show about four gals, sex
and the suburbs. And it's huge! So huge, in fact, that more than
twenty million are tuning in faithfully. Desperate Housewives they call
it and they make me desperate, desperate not to keck every time annoying
Mary Alice voices over vacuous holes in the plot line.

Now it is not unusual when the public applauds bad television. Children
of the eighties recall, if you will, a little show called Greatest
American Hero about a teacher who dawned a magic suit and saved people
from stuff. The best thing about that show, aside from Ralph's hair, was
that it never tried to disguise itself as anything other than crap.
Those were the days when bad television could just be bad and no one
tried to convince anyone otherwise.

In recent years, however, the undisguised shoddiness of television
programs like Greatest American Hero have given way to the smug claptrap
of offerings like Desperate Housewives; a program which disguises itself
as something original. Sadly, we seem unable to recognize the
difference between novelty and nonsense. The same can be said of those
who believe Ashlee Simpson dying her hair black was a note-worthy act of
rebellion. But that's a whole other story.

Faster than you can say Swiffer Wet Jet, mother after mother, housewife
after housewife, is opening wide for a heaping spoonful of the latest in
network subterfuge. Replace the city with the suburb, Cosmopolitans
with Neapolitan, Manolos with macaroni and before you know it, there
are four new ladies to emulate.

When Sex and the City left us flailing for a new raison d'etre, the
smart people set about creating another program around which we could
rally. But how did we go, in such a short period of time, from
programming that featured four single, unapologetic, sex-starved maniacs
to a program about four attached, apologetic, sexually frustrated
ignoramuses?

Susan, a neurotic little scaramouch of a thing looking for love in all
the wrong places versus Carrie, a neurotic little scaramouch of a thing,
looking for love in all the groovy places. Bree and Miranda are both
controlling, driven perfectionists while Gabrielle and Samantha are the
whores to Madonna-like Lynette and Charlotte. Like Julia choosing to
name her kid Phinnaeus, it seems everything old really can be cool
again.

You're a Bree, the ladies exclaimed, but we are more like Susan. Funny
it wasn't that long ago when most women would have described themselves
as a Carrie. Apologies to various Hollywood ingenues but Kabbala
schmabala. Desperate Housewives is the new faith and we are not
required to don that difficult-to-accessorize red string bracelet.

Although there are a few obvious differences between the two programs;
for example, one sucks and the other doesn't, what is most obvious is
that kids and moms make a comeback. Mary Eberstadt, the author of Home
Alone America, a new book that lays most of the problems with today's
kids firmly at the feet of working mothers, likely approves. Hey
Mary, perhaps you should consider a sequel that addresses how well
children fare when their stay-at-home mom blows her head off or takes
ADD medication. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to hypothesize that
the kids of Wisteria Lane will probably spend some time in re-hab.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if we were simply allowed to enjoy this
program as a genuine guilty pleasure? Instead, Time Magazine goes and
publishes an article defending Desperate Housewives as being 'ironic' in
what seems an attempt to inflate the quality and meaning of the program
beyond all possible reason. The thing about irony, other than being hard
to define, is that people do not relate to irony. People relate to
things, well, that they can relate to.

And moms do relate to the Desperate Housewives, however, the actually
irony may be that no real woman resembles them in any way. Do you know
anyone who would define herself as a "housewife"? In fact, there was a
time, in the not so distant past, when the term housewife was considered
as distasteful to these same women as the term desperate. Now we rally
around a program that combines both adjectives as a moniker.

The only truly relatable character on television is that ubiquitous Marge
Simpson. At least the producers of The Simpsons seem capable of
creating a stay-at-home mom that is recognizable. Her kids are
hellions, her husband is a dolt, her house is uninspiring and she needs
a haircut and highlights. But underneath all of the disappointment and
compromise is a loving, intelligent woman holding it all together.

In a post 9-11 viewing environment where "urban" is the new enemy and
exit polling indicates that family values rank high on an anxious
nation's list of concerns perhaps it is not surprising that a program
about families living on tree-lined boulevards hits such a chord. In a
television market dominated by the CSI franchise, there is something
refreshing about a show featuring women, kids and car pools instead of
men, morgues and pools of blood.

But you will have to excuse this television viewer if she mourns the
days when friendship, sex and cocktails ruled the day; when women could
have children and fancy careers like Clair Huxtable and Murphy Brown.
Thank goodness those same smart people in Hollywood who have turned
their backs on those ladies see fit to occasionally replay that old stop
motion version of Rudolph with the creepy Santa. At least all will not
be lost this holiday season.

Pam de Montmorency is a freelance writer and television producer, living
in Toronto.