Desperate Housewives - the verdict

The Desperate Housewives are a bunch of five women and mostly what they do is complain and fret. They live in beautiful houses in Wisteria Lane with all mod cons and a leisure facility that approaches a perfect 24/7.

OK, the houses are a bit similar and maybe a bit close together, but that only goes to foster a sense of community.

There is a good deal of sex in the air, but that is mostly where it stays, apart from Gabrielle who works out with the gardener. The rest are not getting any at all - or of the irritatingly reproductive sort.

Desperate Housewives has caused a backlash in sections of Right-wing America, but it can hardly be connected with the sexual content. More likely is the sense that here is a programme that satirises traditional family values in order to undermine them.

Mary Alice, the narrator, kills herself at the start of the first episode, but why she does so is a mystery. She cooks breakfast for her family, does the minuscule chores and runs a couple of errands.

Where is the husband? Out there earning the money, probably trapped in some glass tower, running scared of the boss. She was, relatively speaking, in heaven. Why she should decide to make the condition eternal is anyone's guess. Cue the rattling of skeletons in closets.

We are introduced to Martha's friends, each of whom is defined by food. Gabrielle is the saucy one who turns up at the wake with the spicy paella, and who keeps in trim with the gardener while her husband is out there earning the money.

Bree is the perfectionist who arrives with perfectly baked buns in baskets, a woman who keeps her family in a state of subjugation by force feeding them haute cuisine.

Susan is the single mother deserted by her man, who ran off with his secretary. Her revenge is to specialise in utterly inedible macaroni cheese. He is doubtless out there somewhere, working his backside off, having to provide for two women. Lynette arrived towing children like a fox with hounds attached. Her husband, albeit mostly absent earning money to put food in mouths, was, by all accounts, a decent guy. The only problem was that every time he came home, he was so pleased to see his wife that he left her up the duff again.

The men, when they appeared at all, carried the glummest of expressions. Here, in the bright sunlight, all their earthly efforts were mocked. They all knew their jobs in life were forecourt attendants, required simply to fill up the tanks of their curvy ladies with highoctane fuel.

One husband states that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation". I'll take my hat off to that feller. An hour in this sort of female company has convinced me that men are regarded only as raw material for the food processor. On second thoughts, with teeth like these, there is no need for a food processor. It may well be that a woman shoots herself but, as ever, it was the men who were getting it in the neck. Pete Clark

Strangely addictive and utterly, utterly terrifying

To be a desperate housewife in America! The fortysomething women might be desperate and bored and overrun with children, but look what else they had - amazing houses, amazing clothes, amazing bodies and extremely unamazing husbands who didn't demand much apart from divorce.

See? That's how simple, on first reckoning, it was.

It wasn't particularly taxing to watch. Everyone looked glamorous. Everyone had money. Everyone had problems and kids and problem kids but nothing seemed that terrible.

In fact, for about half an hour it bowled along at a merry pace, perfectly good entertainment with some pretty touches - Gabrielle mowing the lawn in her posh designer frock, the relationship between Susan and her teenage offspring. "Remind me why I applied for custody," Susan says to her daughter.

That made me chuckle into my glass of wine.

There seemed nothing to rock the boat, nothing to make you gasp and wince and look away. There seemed to be no painful truths, no particular insight into a life that many women lead. Why

had my friends and I spent weeks looking forward to watching it? Surely, since most of us live in the country (England's version of the suburbs) and have kids and have given up high-powered jobs to stay at home, surely I must recognise some nugget of truth? By the end, I realised that I had. I was hooked. How familiar were those characters? I know Bree's. I sipped coffee with one this morning, a woman so desperate to make sense of her out-of-control life that she reaches for a Nigella cook book, convinced that a loving osso bucco will solve her familial problems.

I know at least two Gabrielles. One's having "fun" with her life coach and the other is intimate with the plasterer of the extension her husband's paying for.

And Lynette? If I were to be honest, with my three screaming boys and barely contained sense of irritation at a world passing me by that I once used to belong to... I don't need to say any more.

Desperate Housewives may not be that clever and that probing but, for women waiting for our men to get in from work or a business trip (now, did he take his secretary?) or for those facing another day with screaming children, it's strangely familiar. How utterly, utterly terrifying. How utterly, utterly addictive. Lucy Cavendish.