Desperate Housewives‘s season two was the NBA basketball game of TV shows Ñ¿ only the final minutes counted. You find out what happened, then you’re done.

Well, it wasn’t quite  that bad. But still. Before its second season,  Desperate Housewives was a show that galvanize network broadcasting, which was on the ropes thanks to competition from HBO, cable in general, sports channels, sports in general, video games, and everything else that floods this self-amusement ridden culture, including counter-programing on the other four networks.   DH is one of the shows that people point to when they say that episodic television is now better than movies.

Or they used to anyway. Something happened to  DH in season two, yet no one has been able to say just what it was exactly. For example, the new issue of  Entertainment Weekly simply refers to No. 2 as lacking No. 1’s “humor and dramatic unity,” while also getting show creator Marc Cherry to admit that he “learned a lot” toiling on the troubled S2. While everyone was pondering the flaws in  DH2, the other ABC shows —  Lost 2 and  Grey’s Anatomy 2 — continued to garner more prestige and obsessive viewers. I happen to have a theory about what, if anything, went wrong,   which I’ll get to shortly.

The new  Desperate Housewives: The Complete Second Season, The Extra Juicy Edition will give students of the show a chance to sit down and watch its second frame in rapid succession, and doing so may allow viewers to glean clues as to why the second season is bad, or at least widely considered to be inferior to the first.

I’m baffled as to why people think that. After all, this is the season when Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) had a jealous fight with a nun in a church, eventually setting her on fire. And speaking of fire, this is also the season where the accidental pyromaniac of last season faces a conflagration in her own home. This is also the season where Lynette (Felicity Huffman) and her husband change jobs and roles, and  where Bree Van De Kamp (Marcia Cross) watches like an angel of death over hysterical pharmacist Roger, whom she lets die in what would have otherwise been a theatrical suicide attempt. Then she abandoned her psychopathic son on an isolated road in the woods. And Susan (Teri Hatcher) broke up with her “plumber” boyfriend and fall back in with her untrustworthy husband, if only temporarily. Not to mention the season-long mystery of the thing or creature in the basement of the hour that new neighbor Betty Applewhite (Alfre Woodard ) just moved into.

 

There was quite a bit of action on Wisteria Lane in the season, starting with the resolution of the cliffhanger from S1, and golf carting through all manner of hospital visits, fights, spyings, and psychological games. Personally, I’m a little baffled as to why some critics detected a falling off. Maybe S2 was a little  too chaotic, I don’t know; too me it seemed of a piece with the first season, while progressing forward into dark areas, especially in the Van De Kamp family (but I am a sucker: I am continuously surprised at how show writers can come up with new and interesting twists). There are some nice twists in this season; the Danny Elfman music still makes the show by setting a certain tone, jaunty, puppet like, racing, and for me it was a delight to see the normally invisible, because she is dead, narrator Mary Alice (Brenda Strong) pop up in special flashbacks: she has a fantastic voice but also a beautiful smile.

But if so, if there really was something wrong with S2 I think I know what the source of the problem is: Emmy whoring.  DH won five Emmys out of numerous nominations for its first season. This may have gone to the head of the sort of people who run  DH,  that is, people obsessed with awards and award ceremonies. On the new DVD set, creator Marc Cherry mentions a couple of times how this or that scene should have won an Emmy. If your goal is to achieve personal or corporate validation from awards, then you are thinking outside the box in a bad way; your eyes are on the prize, not on the substance of the scene, its place in the show, and the show as a whole.  DH won no Emmys in 2006.

But you can make up your own mind. Season two of  Desperate Housewives comes in a lavish package, the six discs in a folding multi-disc digipak with a see-through plastic holder. The 24 episodes, in excellent widescreen transfers, are spread over five discs, with the final platter holding all the supplements.

These include a video interview with Marc Cherry and his mother, an inspiration for the show; a 10-minute segment on how a typical show (in this case, Ep 13) is created; a group interview with various contrasting TV moms from  Happy Days‘s Marion Ross to The Walton‘s Michael Learned. 

 

 

There are no audio commentary tracks, but Cherry provides one of sorts over a selection of his favorite scenes, plus over two story lines pulled from episodes for time; there is a profile of the show’s costumer, a promotional bit about the show’s sex scenes, a promotional summary of season one, a look at the  DH video poker game, and finally trailers for numerous other Disney shows and movies.

 

Desperate Housewives: The Complete Second Season, The Extra Juicy Edition hit the stree on Tuesday, August 29, and retails for 59.95

 

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