The hit TV series Desperate Housewives depicts red-haired Bree as the model retro-1950s housewife and mother who cooks gourmet meals and keeps the house in perfect order. This ideal is, however, gradually exposed revealing turmoil beneath the superficial harmony. Refusing to allow her all too human family to mar her perfect, shiny life, Bree denies their feelings and represses her own, smiling her way through marriage break-up, and her children's rebellions, papering over disharmony and distress. While for husband, Rex, married life is made intolerable by Bree's controlling behaviour – even packing his suitcase when he decides to leave – Bree's control is superficial and her acts often subterranean, manipulative and subversive. Lacking overt power, she controls by stealth (sabotaging the sofa so her husband is forced to return to the marital bed) and through shaming (removing her son's bedroom door as punishment after he visits a strip club). Bree is both a slave and a tyrant, manipulating those she serves and services.

Marc Cherry's ‘darkly comic’ TV series has been condemned by conservatives as an assault on morality and by some feminists as a celebration of old-time family values, while others have applauded its ironic commentary on suburban life and commented on the influence of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique (1973) and David Lynch's Twin Peaks (1990–1). If Desperate Housewives does provide a tongue-in-cheek critique of the rituals and mores of love, romance and family life, in the process and no less sardonically, it also twists and refigures the soap opera, the sitcom and the small-town film genres revealing the fears, hatreds and desperation behind the pretty gardens and superficially happy families.