The Fab Four

confess: I’m hooked. I know what I will be doing this Sunday night at 9 and every other Sunday night for the rest of the season. Along with over 20 million other Americans I will be hunkered down watching ABC’s Desperate Housewives, the show that has had the most successful launch, ratings-wise, since Friends started in 1994. And just as Friends was a sign of its times—with its super-groomed, bigcity yuppie singles hanging out in a coffee bar and looking for love—Desperate Housewives, with its middle-class suburban wives and mothers, seems to be just right for today.

First of all, Housewives airs on Sunday, the perfect time for such a series. Over the years there have often been television programs, from Ed Sullivan’s “really big show” to 60 Minutes, that have helped end the weekend and give viewers something to talk about in the office on Monday morning. Now weekends are more frantic than ever, especially for families with kids. After two days of ferrying children to soccer games and ice-skating lessons, attending church, cooking Sunday dinner for grandparents, and overseeing the homework that never gets done till just before bed on Sunday night, moms all over the country are collapsing on the couch, grateful for a fix of gloriously entertaining chick-TV. And a surprising number of dads, also involved in family

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Myrna Blyth

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confess: I’m hooked. I know what I will be doing this Sunday night at 9 and every other Sunday night for the rest of the season. Along with over 20 million other Americans I will be hunkered down watching ABC’s Desperate Housewives, the show that has had the most successful launch, ratings-wise, since Friends started in 1994. And just as Friends was a sign of its times—with its super-groomed, bigcity yuppie singles hanging out in a coffee bar and looking for love—Desperate Housewives, with its middle-class suburban wives and mothers, seems to be just right for today.

First of all, Housewives airs on Sunday, the perfect time for such a series. Over the years there have often been television programs, from Ed Sullivan’s “really big show” to 60 Minutes, that have helped end the weekend and give viewers something to talk about in the office on Monday morning. Now weekends are more frantic than ever, especially for families with kids. After two days of ferrying children to soccer games and ice-skating lessons, attending church, cooking Sunday dinner for grandparents, and overseeing the homework that never gets done till just before bed on Sunday night, moms all over the country are collapsing on the couch, grateful for a fix of gloriously entertaining chick-TV. And a surprising number of dads, also involved in family