A Desperate Man

“Desperate Housewives,” is so over. Get ready for “Desperate Husband.” CBS has cast the pilot for a new half-hour sitcom called “The Angriest Man in Suburbia,” in which a New York City tax attorney is transplanted to the California suburbs to be a minivan-driving stay-at-home dad. About pilots that haven’t yet seen the light of the cathode ray, we must be silent, but the explicit use of the “S” word in the title makes it likely that the show’s creator, Ajay Saghal, patterned his show after ABC’s sitcom phenomenon about five women slowly going crazy on white-picketed Wisteria Lane.

Suburbia has been portrayed on television since before “Leave It to Beaver,” but satirizing suburbia (and with a title like that, we can only hope the new show is intended to be satire) is tricky ground. “Desperate Housewives” succeeded for most of its two hit seasons on creator Marc Cherry’s storytelling, which was so deft that it hid the fact that his critique of suburbia was a retread of a retread. Cherry ‘s “big satirical point,” wrote Matt Feeney last year in Slate, “that nostalgified suburbia is really a hive of hypocrisy and perversion … is old and obvious enough to support its own brand of nostalgia (i.e., ‘’The Stepford Wives,’ ‘American Beauty’).” Cherry himself has said the key to understanding “Desperate Housewives” is that he never intended to critique the suburbs: “The truth is I’m not making fun of the suburbs. I love the suburbs,” he told the Associated Press early in the show’s run.

Indeed, one of the curious facts of “Desperate Housewives” as satire is that it is most popular in among middle-aged men and women in suburban areas. “While college girls still cling nostalgically to their full 6-season DVD sets of Sex and the City, married suburbanites hastily put their kids to bed on Sunday nights and flip to the show that unabashedly pokes fun at their lifestyles,” wrote Gena Gorlin on The Undercurrent, a newsletter of fans of Ayn Rand. This makes perfect sense if it’s understood that Cherry’s show confirms, however backwardly, the basics premises of suburban life. Sahgal, a novelist who lives in California with his wife and a two-year-old, has probably spent his share of days at home looking at the lawn. Here’s hoping it’s left him with a love for his surroundings.