Desperate Housewives takes place on prestigious Wisteria Lane in a nameless suburb. It follows the lives of friends and women who are all housewives and, as the title tells us, all a bit desperate. The opening scene of the first episode shows Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong, Red Dragon) shooting herself in the head. We are then soon introduced to her friends and neighbors who it seems are all very close. There's Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher, of TV's Lois and Clark: The Adventures of Superman), a divorcee and single mom, Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman, Raising Helen), who gave up her business career to raise her four out-of-control children, Bree Van De Kamp (Marcia Cross, The Wind Effect) who seems to be the perfect mother and wife and Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria of TV's The Talent Agency), who is having an affair with her high-school-age gardener. The show takes us through the lives of each of these four friends while Mary Alice narrates from heaven.

The show exaggerates different situations that many upper-middle class housewives deal with. Susan is that type of person that always seems to find herself in bad situations. For instance, she accidentally burns down a neighbor's house by knocking a candle into a curtain and later gets locked out of her house completely naked. However, Teri Hatcher does a wonderful job portraying this poor woman who just wants to win the heart of her new neighbor Mike Defino (James Denton, Primary Colors).

Felicity Huffman, who usually plays a powerful business woman, shows great diversity in depicting this exasperated housewife whose life seems to be almost out of control. While she and her husband are in a loving relationship, he is often on business trips, and she is left to hold down the fort alone. Huffman does a fabulous job portraying a disheveled mother who is constantly running around after her kids. Eva Longoria and Marcia Cross also are completely believable in their roles as housewives. Cross does a great job as being the obsessive-compulsive, outwardly perfect wife that is having internal family issues. Longoria plays the beautiful ex-model in an unhappy marriage that she entered into just to enjoy her husband's money.

Overall, the writing is witty and hilarious. There are comic story lines like when Lynette leaves her three sons on the side of the road for five minutes to teach them to behave in the car. When she returns to pick them up, they haven't vanished. In another hilarious story, Gabrielle has to run home from a black tie dinner party to mow the lawn because her gardener has not done it due to the affair they're having.

Besides the hilariously funny hi-jinxes of the four women, there is also an underlying mystery that still exists within Mary Alice's family and Wisteria. At the end of the first episode the women find a note addressed to Mary Alice that says "I know what you did, I'm going to tell." To add on to that, her husband Paul (Mark Moses, Saving Jessica Lynch) seems to almost not care that he has lost his wife, and the viewers see him throw a trunk in a body of water that turns out to have the remains of a body in it. We also find out that while Mike is posing as a plumber, he is really a detective although we do not know what he is investigating. Since the show only reveals a few clues each week to the mystery behind Mary Alice's death, the program keeps viewers glued to the screen.

Desperate Housewives is truly addicting, and once you watch one episode you just can't stop. TV ratings have confirmed this. While Desperate Housewives has only had three episodes so far this season, it has always been in the top five of the Neilson TV ratings. Make sure you check out this funny and hilarious show.