Desperately Seeking Rewrites

Before the WGA strike hit on November 5, we already knew the first noticeable impact would be on late night television which propels on same-day headlines.

Less clear was how the strike would bear on television's dramas and comedies. Many shows have steered toward obvious mid-season cliffhangers as sensational teasers for tumultuous status-quo shakedowns overrun the airwaves. You'd think summer was on its way and not the Holidays.

One of the more attention-grabbing promos was for Sunday night's episode of Desperate Housewives in which a tornado rumbles through Wisteria Lane. It featured housewives running not merely desperately, but in sheer panic as the cul-de-sac's residents went scrambling for the nearest basement.

The teaser ended with Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman) running through the wreckage, blood-stained and frantic as her shriek of horror echoed into the next commercial.

Chilling stuff. And I'll admit, I was intrigued.

But tuning in, it didn't take long to sense something was askew. My wife noticed it, too. The acting was strange. Particularly that of a throw-away character who made her debut last week. A literal throw-away character as she was sucked right off the show. My wife suggested that maybe the directing was the trouble. I nodded agreeably. But there was something else.

By the second commercial break, I looked at my wife and said, "You know what? I think they shot a first draft."

For the first time in three years as an avid Desperate Housewives viewer, I felt that the writing of an episode was downright... How should I say this?

Dreadful.

Now, before I go on, let me clear the air a little. I'm a man who really digs "guy movies" like Apocalypse Now and Reservoir Dogs. Hell, I'll even watch Road House under the right circumstances. So when I say I've watched Desperate Housewives loyally since its inception, that's a testament to just how well written this show usually is.

But the F5 on Sunday night did more than skewer Vince Lang with a picket fence torpedo. It tossed the satire right into the next county, leaving just a soap opera in its wake.

You could see the bones of what the writers tried to do in each scene. For example, when Edie Britt lambastes a neighbor kid for price gauging water before the storm, you could tell there was something almost funny happening and that a second pass by the writers might have yielded comic gold. Nicollette Sheridan, by the way, is a vastly underappreciated actress as she chewed the scenery in even this subpar episode.

Housewives is a mix of comedy and drama. A balancing act that the show has always handled deftly. And while the comedy in the latest episode was mostly absent, the drama took the biggest hit. The scenes with Mike and Susan in the emergency room were particularly overwrought. By the time Mike -- in a withdrawl-enduced craze -- left-hooked a hospital security guard, the actions of these normally well-motivated characters had become cringe worthy.

Clearly this last episode of Housewives before hiatus was rushed on the page. It was probably even punched in at the 11th hour before the strike commenced. But it's intriguing to see, when all other production elements are the same, how integral the script is to the quality of entertainment.

The set of Desperate Housewives was picketed directly on November 6th. And this must have been the episode which was disrupted. Little did the picketers know that the greater disruption had already been perpetrated. The one that sank any possibility of rewrites.

I don't mean to point out the folly of Housewives' pre-hiatus finale as a means to gloat. Indeed, Marc Cherry and the cast of the show have been some of the staunchest supporters of the WGA and have walked the picket lines personally several times.

What's interesting about this, though, is the stark illustration of why the WGA strike is important. For TV and film writers to do their jobs well and to do it properly, there needs to be an atmosphere of mutual respect. Because when scripts are put under strain or left unfostered by the companies who produce them, slipping from something good to bad can be as easy as flipping a toggle switch.

The tornado on Wisteria Lane seemed almost an allegory for the havoc reeked by the Guild's failed negotiations with the AMPTP. It probably felt that way to the show's creators at any rate. The industry is certainly in the grips of shifting winds, to say the least.

Desperate Housewives will be back in its full glory once everything settles down. The silver lining to Sunday night's funnel cloud is that at least the turkey which aired made the TV hiatus a little more, well... negotiable.