Two decades after Wisteria Lane first drew the country in, "Desperate Housewives" is finding a fresh set of viewers, ABC7 reports. A quick disclosure first, then the piece.
The disclosure
The show aired on ABC, streams on Hulu, and the outlet whose reporting this is built on, ABC7, all sit under the Walt Disney Company. So this is, in part, a Disney-owned station telling you about a Disney-owned show now available on a Disney-owned streamer. The facts, an eight-season run, its awards, its return to popularity, check out, and we flag the corporate relationship because a nostalgic revisit of a hit is also, conveniently, a nudge toward a library the same parent company profits from.
The show, and the numbers
"Desperate Housewives" ran on ABC for eight seasons, from 2004 to 2012. It arrived big: it was the number-one show in the country during its premiere week. Over its run it collected 38 Primetime Emmy nominations and won seven. The ensemble, Teri Hatcher, Eva Longoria, Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross and Brenda Strong, became one of the most recognizable on television.
What is bringing it back is the same thing reviving a lot of older network shows: streaming. All eight seasons now live on Hulu, and, as with several pre-streaming hits, a younger audience that never watched it on Sunday nights is discovering it on demand.
Why it worked, per the people who made it
Creator Marc Cherry located part of the show's original novelty in something simple. "When we premiered, there was not another show with 'Housewives' in the title," he said, a line that lands differently now, in an era saturated with "Real Housewives" franchises the show arguably helped make possible.
Cast member Steven Culp pointed to the tonal mix as the real innovation: "the interesting mixture of comedy and drama and mystery that at that time nobody else was doing." That blend, a soap that was also a murder mystery that was also a satire of suburbia, is the thing a new viewer clicking on it today still encounters, and the reason it has aged better than a straight melodrama would.
The honest register
Nearly 22 years after the premiere, this is not major news, and it does not pretend to be. It is a nostalgia story with a streaming hook and a corporate parent that benefits from you feeling the nostalgia. Taken on those terms, it is also a fair reminder that a well-built show outlives its network run: "Desperate Housewives" was genuinely groundbreaking television, and a new audience getting to it through Hulu is a real, if modest, cultural afterlife for a series made here, about the particular American fantasy and dread of the perfect suburban street.
