i’d rather be in haena   

Desperate Housewives.
At first I thought it was a middlebrow-edgy, cartoony ripoff of American Beauty (itself a cartoony ripoff of Blue Velvet) and Six Feet Under. I figured, however, it would be worth watching for a ever-lovely, lid-lifted Teri Hatcher and the amazing Felicity Huffman– she of Bill Macy spousehood, yes– and the first half of the season has borne out all my suspicions.
What’s surprised me is how the show has become a media symbol of…something or other. It’s constantly referenced by wags and pundits as some sort of new, elevated [sic] benchmark of calculated sleaze and/or moral decline. Perhaps the (very) average ABC prime time audience member finds DH outrageous, envelope-nudging and yes, well, even quite daring and naughty. To those comfortably arriving at that conclusion…well, I can only imagine they haven’t ventured beyond network TV (nay, even basic cable) in the past two or five or eight years.
For those who prefer their pop-culture ambiguity self-serving and cynical, there’s an okay essay by Richard Goldstein in the December 16th The Nation here.