As Jill Winters puts it in her essay, “The Lost Boys of Wisteria Lane”, the very title of the show is deceptive, in that the four main female protagonist in the show are anything but desperate. Just like the women in this show are anything but the archetype housewives, their husbands, the natural counterparts, are anything but the archetype. And while Desperate Housewives is not what one would call a healthy show (in that it has sex, drugs and violence embedded throughout the storyline, as well as less than stellar morality), with books such as Welcome to Wisteria Lane: On America’s Favorite Desperate Housewives, one is bound to glean a lot of interesting answers to questions of morality pertaining to female relationships, marriage, and what makes or breaks a community-building process.
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