Sundays in the Park with George - 
by EdHIll
How has the season stacked up so far for Desperate Housewives? Well if the critics are any judge it’s a bit of a letdown. “Edging toward vapidity� is the term being bandied about. Edging? It’s a nighttime soap starring Teri Hatcher, Nicollette Sheridan and half the cast of Melrose Place. People should stop expecting M*A*S*H and realize we are dealing with more of an After M*A*S*H. I mean the parallels between Teri Hatcher and Jamie Farr’s careers are positively eerie.
That being said, will the season pick up? Will we finally jettison the idiotic “who’s in the basement?� story line (Answer = no one cares) and move on to something more, I don’t know, interesting? Well don’t look at me to answer that question. I always thought the show was vapid. But since 80% of my television viewing habits consist of reality shows and the Food Network (Alton Brown is god), who am I to judge?
We open this week’s episode in what can only be described as the most poorly designed prison in history. Gabrielle is walking in to visit Carlos in jail, and the visitor’s entrance for some reason runs right through the prison yard, with only a chain link fence and about a foot of clearance on either side. The kind of prison that would take Andy Dufresne about ten minutes to break out of, but not before he brooded about his life for a few months. This of course is all designed as a plot device so we can see the inmates ogling Gabrielle as she enters each week for her visits with Carlos. And it's quite funny seeing the ABC Sunday television version of horny inmates. It’s so PG it’s almost quaint. You half expect them to scream “You are so darn pretty gosh dangit!� A far cry from the world of Oz with its graphic depictions of gay sex. Man, an HBO Desperate Housewives would have a totally different demographic.
Gabrielle is walking with her lawyer into prison, demanding that he get her conjugal visits. I'm not sure why, other than the writers can't think their way out of a paper bag, but for some reason he refuses this simple request. So they get into a heated argument which results in Gabrielle slapping the lawyer after he insults her. This riles up the lovable non-R-rated inmates (this is probably the prison where they keep all the people arrested for removing mattress tags or illegally downloading the latest Clay Aiken CD). The men that are less than a foot away behind the flimsiest chain link fence imaginable. Seriously, this whole scene is laughable. I think they filmed it outside the ABC commissary with paper mache fences. Of course on Disney-owned ABC land, a riot is seeing the lawyer get playfully poked with the end of a broomstick to the merriment of all. Over at FOX, however, a riot involves stabbing guards to death and attempted gang rapes. And in HBO land, it’s the same as FOX, only minus the "attempted" part, and there’s no women present.
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