This is seemingly what Tyson Foods and Lowe's Home Improvement are sayingregarding their separate decisions not to advertise in any future episodes of the new hit ABC show. They are shocked, according to press stories, knowing networks will program story lines about housewives who have extramarital affairs. My question is not whetherthey read any scripts - but whether they had read the title of the series. What did they think the show was about - women desperate to find the right floor wax, ginseng, or botox? Please. For thelast five months, there shouldn't have been any surprises about the content in this series. Since the May upfront network meetings, the show has had no secrets, being highly touted and given goodcritical reviews. Additionally, advertisers have been regularly getting preview tapes of this and other primetime shows for the last 20 years. advertisement
Desperate Housewives (2004)
Content-wise, women have been having extramaritalaffairs on primetime TV since daytime soaps in the 1970s, and in primetime since "Knots Landing," "Dallas," and "Dynasty" in the early 1980s. Like those shows, "Housewives" properly airs in anon-family time slot, on Sunday from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. And, like the other shows, these trysts are never glorified as model behavior. Tyson and Lowe's say they are not "pulling" any advertising -just that they won't be buying future spots. The truth is, both planned to run only one commercial each. So their declarations come with little downside, aside from the publicity kind. (In Lowe'scase, the commercial was bought by Whirlpool USA in a co-branded spot). So why the big stink? It seems these companies were pushed around by a small TV pressure group that doesn't fullyrepresent all TV viewers - and, more importantly, doesn't represent the majority of their customers. The same millions of viewers who have made this show a hit, are the same viewers who buydrywall from Lowe's, washers from Whirlpool, and chicken breasts from Tyson Foods. Some TV viewers may even have breasts, I'm told. Shocking. Yet, from my point of view, I saw no breasts in"Desperate Housewives" only the suggestion of breasts. And I've seen these suggestions before - with no fainting spells from advertisers - in daytime soap operas over the last two decades. "Desperate Housewives" is a good satire about a somewhat stereotypical group of modern day housewives, a romp on the boring nature of domestic goddess-ness. Fanatical anti-TV worshippers sentthousands of e-mails to advertisers, which crashed their servers. In response, advertisers should take the high road and be more reverential toward their media planning and buying beliefs. Comment Next story loading About the AuthorWayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Even before it hit the small screen, ABC's Desperate Housewives (2004) courted controversy. The evening soap opera, focusing on the lives of four suburban women after the suicide of their neighbor and friend Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong), delves into the lurid secrets lurking just under the neatly manicured surface of the protagonists' lives.
Reading Desperate Housewives: Beyond the White Picket Fence edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass is the latest addition to I.B. Tauris' Contemporary Television Series. McCabe and Akass serve as editors and have overseen other volumes including Reading Sex and the City (2004) and Reading the L Word: Outing Contemporary Television (2006). The essays anthologized in Reading Desperate Housewives include writings from scholars and journalists whose contributions range from a transcript of an imagined recording of George W. Bush's comments on an episode to more traditional academic pieces.
En déclarant le 30 avril 2005 lors d'un dîner de gala à la Maison-Blanche I am a desperate housewife [2], Laura Bush a assuré le succès de la série et cela quelques semaines après le passage d'un reportage spécial dans le Oprah Winfrey Show[3].
La serie, dapprima rifiutata da molte reti televisive, ha scalato la classifica degli ascolti sin dal primo episodio e ottenuto numerosi riconoscimenti. Quello delle desperate housewives è immediatamente diventato un fenomeno culturale che ha investito in primo luogo le attrici e gli attori della serie nonché la ABC. Cronaca impietosa dell'american way of life, la serie è divenuta un fenomeno mediatico senza precedenti, con spettatori eccellenti: anche l'allora first lady statunitense Laura Bush[1] è arrivata a definire pubblicamente sé stessa, e la second lady Lynne Cheney, come delle casalinghe disperate.[2] 2ff7e9595c
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