Plot
Desperate Housewives focuses on the lives of several residents of the fictitious street of Wisteria Lane. The suburban neighborhood is shocked by the suicide of Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong), who seems to have led an ideal domestic life. Mary Alice's close friends, Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher), Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), Bree Van de Kamp (Marcia Cross), and Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria), struggle to come to terms with the news. Later, Mary Alice's son, Zach (Cody Kasch), awakens in the middle of the night to find his father, Paul (Mark Moses), unearthing a mysterious chest from the drained swimming pool in their backyard.
Susan, a divorced mother, takes interest in Mike Delfino (James Denton), a plumber who has recently moved to Wisteria Lane; however, she faces competition with neighbor Edie Britt (Nicollette Sheridan), a promiscuous serial divorcée. Suspicious that Mike is spending the night with Edie, Susan enters Edie's home uninvited with the pretense of borrowing sugar. While inside, she accidentally knocks over a candle, which sets fire to the entire house. Susan flees the scene, leaving behind her glass measuring cup. Though wracked with guilt, Susan is relieved to learn that Mike was not the man with whom Edie was fornicating. Meanwhile, Lynette, a former career woman, is frustrated with raising four young children while her husband, Tom (Doug Savant), is constantly away on business.
Bree, a perfectionist homemaker who feels unappreciated by her family, is troubled when her husband Rex (Steven Culp) asks for a divorce. She poisons him by mistakenly putting onions, to which he is deathly allergic, in his salad. At the hospital, Rex accuses Bree of being emotionally unavailable and obsessed with achieving domestic perfection. Elsewhere, Gabrielle, a former model, grows increasingly unhappy with her marriage to Carlos (Ricardo Antonio Chavira), who buys her love with extravagant gifts. She continues an affair with her sixteen-year-old gardener, John Rowland (Jesse Metcalfe).
Paul asks Susan, Lynette, Bree, and Gabrielle to sort through Mary Alice's belongings, as he cannot bear to do so himself. In a box of Mary Alice's clothes, the women discover a blackmail note reading "I know what you did It makes me sick I'm going to tell" The postmark indicates that Mary Alice received it the day she killed herself and the women begin to wonder what secret their friend could have been keeping.
Read more about this topic: Pilot (Desperate Housewives)
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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