Mother’s ruin: how a flying fence killed Desperate Housewives

When it started, back in 2004, Desperate Housewives was a huge, huge hit. Friends and Sex and the City ended that year and clearly audiences were, er, desperate for something to fill the hole they left. Part comedy, part drama, all high-camp insanity, Housewives’ pilot episode was watched by 21 million people. Fans wanted to be Eva Longoria’s character Gabrielle Solis, Bree Van Der Kamp was a gay icon, and it might have happened on TV more than 14 years ago, but ask any devotee about the first time sexy gardener John (Jesse Metcalfe) took his shirt off to mow Gabrielle’s lawn and they’ll probably be able to describe the scene with creepy intensity.

While early seasons of the show dealt with the domestic dramas of Bree, Susan, Gabrielle and Lynette – their failing marriages, out-of-control kids, love-life rivalries – the series became increasingly outlandish. But the show’s real Jump the Shark moment happened in series five. After four series of rowing, sex and affairs with their gardener, their surrogate, the town’s mayor, Nicollette Sheridan and then each other, Gabrielle and Carlos Solis finally got back together. Only for Carlos to go blind after being hit on the head by a flying fencepost during the tornado that destroyed the lane. The final episodes of series four revolved around Carlos lying to Gaby that his sight would come back, all the while hiding the fact that it wouldn’t and he’d be blind for ever.

When the show returned the next year, however, set after a five-year jump into the future, it turns out time was, in fact, a great healer, and the entire blindness storyline had done a huge U-turn. Carlos’s sight could be restored, against all odds! He could see again! A medical miracle!

After that, despite the time jump actually making the show slightly more interesting for a few episodes, everything went downhill. As Carlos regained his sight, it became clear that the show had run out of original ideas. Each season would feature a mysterious new resident moving to Wisteria Lane and a LOT of murders. Like, way too many. Why weren’t the local police suspicious that this unremarkable road suddenly became a hotspot for explosions, car crashes and suicides?

Now transformed from a glossy US drama into a budget telenovela, we saw babies swapped at birth, a plane crash that killed off three major characters, Nicollette Sheridan’s character Edie getting electrocuted to death and a serial strangler terrorising the street. By the time the series was killed off (creator Marc Cherry wanted to end it with season seven, but it actually limped along for eight) sexy gardener John had returned not once but THREE times. Less flogging a dead horse of an idea, more shagging a dead corpse of a storyline, each shirtless episode only served to remind fans how good series one was, and how bad the show had become.

Desperate Housewives’ legacy still lives on – the Real Housewives franchise now has 19 spin-offs, including Athens, Vancouver and Hungary – but the show itself isn’t even on Netflix. Maybe it’s kinder for fans to remember it at its series one best: topless and mowing the lawn.