Welcome to desperately Devoted.
Join us as we explore the human experience through the lens of the iconic show Desperate Housewives.
I'm Terry Hatcher, I'm Andrea Bowen, and I'm a versuon Tanny. Oh my gosh, Hi everybody.
Hi. So this week we are shining our spotlight on episode nine, Suspicious Minds Yes, named after the Elvis song which aired on.
December twelfth, two thousand and four.
In true season one fashion, this episode is bursting with twists and turns.
And speaking of fashion, Gabrielle organizes a charity runway show featuring all the housewives donning glamorous gowns lots to talk about. There, Susan finds out about Gabrielle's affair and confronts her.
Lynette is trying to poach some high grade nanny as she puts it and Breeze. Concern over Andrew's lack of remorse for putting one needles elease in the hospital grows and she is pissed, very much intended.
We will get there.
Oh, let's let's get into it.
Hi.
Hi you guys, Hi love seeing you.
Okay, wait, I gotta ask anybody desperately devoted to anything this week?
Well, my answer just sucks, but I have Sorry, no, it does. Objectively, I'm the judge of it because it has to do with me and my mouth. And I got in VISI line this week.
Wow, I've been there. You have I've been there?
Oh God, Okay to everyone listening and Andrea, who has ever had in VISI line, they I did not feel adequately warned. I'm going to be having this for the next seven months. And I have all this crazy shit on my teeth and it hurts when it's in, and it hurts when it's not in, and it hurts to eat, and and it's it's really but I've been being desperately devoted to my twenty two hours of wearing it a day. Wow, I supposedly need to fix my bite.
Oh that's that's what you think. I mean. You are you doing this?
Well, no, you're you're doing this to save your teeth, not just for like vanity.
Oh I don't care that my teeth are crooked. I would keep them crooked. I have just been told by my dentist that I need to straighten them or else my teeth will wear down and eventually I all need veneers and I don't want veneers.
Yeah.
Wow, So you're desperately devoted to your invisi line. Well, I mean that's the way you got to be committed to stuff like that. It's like going to the gym or it doesn't.
Work, I'm gone.
I'm desperately devoted to go Greek.
That is all I can eat with my invisil line.
You're also desperately devoted, no, I you know, I was like under the weather and I had a really high fever and I just didn't have an appetite and the only thing that I could get down was go Greek plain yogurt and it's really good and I loved it.
So how about you? Were you were you just really devoted to anything?
I would say, yes.
The thing that springs to the top of my mind is my sweet rescue dog, Fig, who shares a name with Terry's cat, which is Gosh.
I know, I know, and she came to she came to me and my husband with that name. But wow, how another way that we're connected.
But but yes, so Fig unfortunately had heartworm, and for those of you out there who know anything about heartworm, it is a terrible thing that dogs contract from mosquitoes, and the treatment is very involved and very very lengthy and very costly. And anyway, after about four months of just kind of going through the trenches with her, she was declared heartworm free.
Oh yeah, I'm devoted to Fig two. I kind of want to I'm here in my bedroom and my Fig is right over there on the bed, and I kind of want to grab her, but she's anyway. So this episode another huge one. I say that about all of them.
It's a big one.
Is a big one. Where do we begin?
I mean, I think we could begin at the very opening, which I have to say, and I know we talk about this all the time, all the ways that the show was so cutting edge and edgy and provocative for its time or for any time. But we start with a peek into various stages of Gabriella's life and things that she I forget what the phrasing was, was the things that she learned or like how she basically how
she learned to wield power. But it starts with the shot of young fifteen year old Gabriella Salsa's calves sitting on the bed when her mom's boyfriend comes.
To step dad. I think that if Mary Alice says, yeah, stepfather.
Her stepfather, and then this, we don't hear exactly what happens in this encounter, but I think we can use our best judgment to guess and we say that this spurred her deciding to move to New York to pursue modeling.
Because he pays her a visit in the middle of the night or something.
Yeah, it was heavy.
And then very quickly, I thought, seguede away from the topic of her potentially being molested or being a victim of sexual assault as a child into her learning that sex is power and using it to kind of blackmail the modeling agency boss to hire her, and then ultimately having Carlos marry her, and then ultimately seducing John the gardener. And I just thought, Wow, this is an arresting opening of an episode.
Yeah, yeah, a lot said without anything being said.
Yeah, yeah, really, it's so true, and it is. It's brief. You could kind of miss it.
In fact, obviously, as we've said, rewatching it, you realize so much you didn't catch the first go around. And I definitely didn't pick up on that in any real way the first time. I watched it when it aired in real time all those years ago. But yeah, it kind of does give us a It gives us a lot more insight into who Gabby is and we need that,
We really need that for her character. So you know, they didn't linger there by any stretch, but it is a necessary bit of information to kind of provide us with.
Yeah, and so then we had Gabby still being in the hospital with Juanita and still kind of trying to figure out, you know, how she might be a better person.
She right, she sees the nurse.
Yeah, she has this moment with the nurse, the nurse who's tending to Juanita, and they have this interaction where the nurse is talking about her life's choices and her line of work, and she says that she sleeps really well at night because she can rest easy knowing that she did some thing of value with her day, that she helped someone, and she helped people. And Gabrielle says, oh,
that must be that must be a nice feeling. But she also and I think that we love to bring up how the show is still timely or there are themes that are mentioned on the show that still feel so relevant and the nurse happened to mention how there's a shortage and they keep cutting their budget, and I wrote down, geez, this may be twenty one years old, but certainly things have not seemed to improve in.
That area, you know, and it's just up every week.
There's something in the episodes that just either indicates how far we've come or how not far we have come anxiety.
I think, how not far we've come?
Yeah, yeah, So it motivates Gabby to decide to throw this charity fashion show, which kind of takes the whole arc of Gabby and also of the affair. And then in a separate lane, we've got Brie and Rex still dealing with Andrew and his life lack of remorse.
Yeah yeah, I mean I was gonna say, just staying on Gabby for a moment, I think it is really interesting. You know, when she has this moment with the nurse, she feels like she's grappling with this idea of life not turning out how you thought it would, or feeling like you missed out on something, which kind of made me go, oh, I wonder if this is what she is trying to recapture or rediscover by having an affair
with someone who is so much younger. And I think it's interesting that the place that she looks to peace for these questions is the perfect marriage of She's going to give back, but it's going to be through something kind of as potentially vacuous or vapid as this fashion show for charity. Obviously, her expertise is modeling in the runway, and she's going to have all the women of Wassiria
Lane dress up. And just before we get in the other storyline with Brie and Rex and Andrew, I need to take one moment for these gowns, the fashion of the show. I am dead at the Y two K fashion. We have Edie, you know, worried about wearing missus Huber's dress, which she says is so ugly.
And I was like, look at all the dresses.
Oh, you thought all of them were ugly?
I didn't know. I mean I thought they were pretty tragic.
No, they were pretty trazzy.
You know what.
I had to come to defense at the gowns.
I did. I thought you I thought everybody looked lovely. Are they things I would personally wear?
No?
But I did think that everyone looked beautiful.
Well, I agree.
By the end of the fashion show, I have a lot of kudos. I thought everyone looked beautiful, but just looking at the dresses on the rack, I really did actually think about the both of you, and I was like, Mom, Andrea, I I'm curious your maybe if you have and I feel like, Andrea, I'm sure you have to have had having grown up on the show like a most regretted y two K dress.
Yes choice, yes, yes, there is a dress that I wore to an event.
Probably around this time.
I was even working with the with the help of a stylist at this point, and I don't know how anyone let me wear this thing and it ended up in a magazine under like worst Dressed of the Week, And like, how dare.
Anyone put a fourteen year old on the list like that?
That's horrible.
You should have put anyone on.
Those lists, right, But in any case, particularly not someone as vulnerable as a fourteen year old teenage girl.
But it is it is a dress.
We could try to find a picture of it, although I don't want to, but it had it was a cocktail dress kind of and it had all these layers in all of these different colors, so each layer of the dress was a different color, and it cascaded down in these different tiers and.
It was just awful.
Every single part of it was awful and it was tragic.
And yeah, I'm so sorry that you ended up on that list. I think, man, I gotta say, like I've had thirty years of being you know, on the list, on the you're on the good list, You're on the bad list, you know you you and.
Ah, just we're all that.
I don't know it's worth this, this this idea of just judging people and then like making it a commercial opportunity to judge people, and then you know, like they're they're still doing the daily mail, you know whatever, every time you leave your house, like you it's an opportunity to fail.
And it doesn't even matter that in this case they were right.
Yeah, right, and and and they could be right, you know, but like it's I always say this about like movies or whatever, like no, no set of one hundred crew members and actors and everybody like set out to make the worst movie ever, Like nobody nobody goes to the red carpet to where to just try to be wearing the worst.
Dress ever, Like you you don't know what.
I don't know what what inspiration comes over you or whatever. Like fashion is supposed to be fun and create a way to express yourself and creative. It's not supposed to be right or wrong, you know. And I don't know,
I don't know. I have I have a tough time with with I mean there's plenty of like the whole the critiquers on TikTok that that do this of all the fashion events, and they're actually great and they're funny, and you know they I guess they make good comments, but but it it is about I just think it's maybe it's not a good thing for the world.
Well, maybe maybe I'm coming down too hard on the gowns in this.
No, they were really bad.
Wait, I wanted to tell you some insight thing that nobody knows. So and this is we're jumping all the way to nearly the end of the episode. But I mean, this is more of an actual shooting thing. So when and I had forgot this, but when we shot that, we shot that somewhere like in Pasadena or Glendale or something. And we also were shooting the cover of TV Guide the same day, Like we all of us ladies had to be there at like four in the morning.
Oh my god, what a long workday for you.
Guys on a workday to shoot the covers of TV Guide. And I remember saying, I can't do it. I can't work like sixteen hours the day before, come home, sleep two hours whatever, get up, drive all the way. You know.
It wasn't like we had drivers. We had to drive ourselves.
So I slept in my trailer, which at the time was like a honeywagon, you know, like we didn't we didn't get bigger, grander trailers until much later into the thing. And I said, well, there'd be a security guard there, and they said yes, because they moved the dressing rooms the night before. And I was like, okay, then I'm just going to go from work to work and sleep in my trailer on location.
Yeah, and I did.
My goodness, you can't I did.
I camped out well, and I think I made the right call. And there was you know, this isn't the only time this happened. I mean, and I'm not complaining per se, but I'm giving the insight of like this show exploded and the press obligations and opportunities, so you know, they go hand in hand came in that, you know, I think there was at one point where Time magazine wanted me to be on the cover. Actually interesting, we should pull this up. I should show this to you guys.
Somebody posted it on my Instagram today and it reminds of it. And the headline was has TV gone too far? And it was me like, you know, kind of making some in pajamas or whatever, sort of making some crazy questionable face like, you know, are we being too provocative with our show? And I thought, isn't that crazy that Desperate Housewives and ABC show was, you know, on nine
o'clock on Sundays. Was it was the that was the character that was going to be on the cover of Time magazine to represent the idea of, you know, are we being too provocative?
I have to say, I mean, I don't think it's that crazy, given that we're rewatching the show right now. I mean, I understand how at the time it could feel like, oh my gosh, but I it was and continues to feel like such a provocative, interesting in some ways ahead of its time, or at least continues to be so relevant show that I love to hear that people were calling it out as such that early on, and kudos to you for being the kind of person who sleeps in your trailer and spoiler alert, you looked
amazing in that scene, so it worked. It was worth sleeping over there.
Your honeywagon. Just that slumber really really worked out for you.
So in this episode, we've got this fashion show going on. We've got Susan discovering that Gabby is having the affair. We've got Tom and Lynette trying to figure out her addiction, and we've got Brie and Rex disagreeing over Andrew's morality.
And we have genius comedic cut from the women looking at their gowns. At the beginning of the episode, as Gabby is starting to organize the runway show, Edie says when she's forced to wear missus hooper dress, she looks at it and she goes ugh.
Missus Hooper said she'd.
Never be caught dead in black, and then we cut immediately to Missus Hooper's dead body rolled up in a black trash bag being buried by Paul. And I think this is just another such a good example of how the plot moved at breakneck speed, but the comedy just was so sharp and cutting.
And she will be buried in to rest eternally alongside that blender.
Yes, I know, why is the blender there?
That was the murder weapon, right of course, so he had to bury it all together. But for missus Huper, it's just kind of uh, you know, just intrinsically funny that she's going to rest forever in peace or not in peace.
But with this, with this.
Sound, the attention, the attention to detail, like the just enough of her arm and her little, you know, silly shirt and I think it was like her watch or whatever, our sticky out of the thing. You know. It's it's those things when when when fans they should know, like,
I mean, those things aren't accidents, you know. Those in a show like this, every little thing you can assume that either the writer or the director or the actor themselves was like I want to do, make this choice, and it's just it's just amazing when the story all gets told together. I mean, I just appreciate all those little details.
It's good.
It's good to call attention to that.
I often have people who don't work in the industry or aren't from you know, haven't read a script before, or aren't familiar with that form of how those things get made. And here I'm a screenwriter. They'll say, well, what do you what do you mean? Like, you write the things that the characters say, Yeah, and.
A lot more.
And I know, I know what's on screen.
I write that, Yeah, And I not trying to laugh at that, because how would someone how you know, how would you know that? Yeah? But but it is true, it's so far beyond just the lines of dialogue. It probably is in the script. Her hand hangs out of the bag with this watch and close on, look at
the blender next to the bag. I mean, I feel like, you know, of course, directors are making their own choices about how they're shooting something, but mostly all of those important beats of the things that we see and the way the characters walk and move is normally in the script, at least to some extent. Or else, you know, people wouldn't know what to be filming or how to how to portray their character.
Yeah, and it really stack up.
I mean they all add up subconsciously sometimes too, like you're you're not necessarily even aware of them as an audience member, but they really add to what distinguishes a show that is so great from one that is maybe not as great.
Yeah, I don't know that. I got to admit, like any fashion dress thing I know.
Tell us no, no, no, no.
I was trying.
I was trying to think while you were talking if I had a specific thing other than just saying that I definitely ended up on both sides of the good and bad throughout my career. But I haven't been able to think of a specific dress yet.
Okay, we'll keep working on that because we love to know. So from this scene, I just want to merge us in because there's so much ground to cover, but I did want to merge us into what we go directly from this scene to a scene establishing that Julie and Zach have become pen pals and are writing each other letters, which definitely kind of comes back later in the episode
as well. I've never had a pen pal. I remember in first grade there was there was the opportunity to have one or something, but I was working at that time still or also, and I don't think I got to actually have a pen pal.
But I've always kind of been curious.
About about writing someone having a friendship developed just by writing back and forth.
Have either of you had a pen pal.
Did you, Because I was going to say, I am a big letter writer, and I never had a pen pal.
When I went off to college. My dad and I.
Would write letters back and forth to each other a lot, because I remember him telling me that was something that he did with his dad. And we hardly ever texted or like talked on the phone. It was all kind of through letter.
And now I felt a little left out.
Fall we did many other things.
We did all the texting in the phone call.
Yeah, And now I think in my this is just recently in the last year or two, as I've started, you know, coming out of COVID, traveling a lot more. I notice in restaurants a lot today they'll put your
receipt attached to a postcard. And you know, normally I think people just leave the postcard on the table, but I have started if I'm in another state or country, taking it and writing it to someone like a friend of mine who is back home, or if I'm in LA thinking about who I have who doesn't live I have lots of friends, you know, who live in other states and don't live in Los Angeles, and I will just.
Write to them.
And sometimes I'll write about the meal, or sometimes I'll just you know, a Postcard's very it's not the commitment of a letter. It's a couple of sentences. But I think it's so fun to get a physical.
Time not that well, I have a relationship with a I have a relationship with a girlfriend on the East Coast that a couple of years ago we started writing letters back and forth to each other just to like get something in the mail. And also what's fun is to go Sometimes it's just on stationary, but sometimes I'll go to paper source or one of these stores and spend you know, a half an hour, like looking for the card that's just gonna, i know, make her day when when.
She opens it.
You know, I know she loves dogs, and I know she loves wine, and you know whatever, So you can find the thing that like is just going to be cute. And I will say, there is all. I will definitely put it in my top five of receiving a letter actually through the snail mail post in my mailbox. How fun that is. Yeah, we should all we should start a campaign of doing that. Actually, we were talking about that when we first started talking about doing the podcast,
because yeah, because the whole episode. The whole series starts around this letter that comes in the mail, and so we thought it would be fun if fans could write in to us with actual snail mail and we could write back to them with actual snail mail. But we don't have an address, so we were.
Advised that might be too technically difficult.
When we get when if we get an address at iHeart, we will, that's safe, we will.
We'll let you know.
Yes, yeah, that would be I That would be very fun.
But what you can do is comment and dm us at Desperately Devoted podcast on Instagram, as many of you already have. We have a special Q and a episode coming soon where we will answer some.
Of your questions.
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A moment, and later this week we will continue our.
Conversation about episode nine Suspicious Minds.
Until then, we are desperately devoted to you.