by Tymoteusz Buhl
There are a lot of TV shows that teach us something about female friendship. Sex and the City told us that a friendship can survive much more than any relationship with a guy. Girls taught us that it can be much more difficult and complex than any romance. Grey’s Anatomy emphasizes how important it is in a challenging work environment. And then there are shows like Desperate Housewives, Big Little Lies or Dead To Me, which explore another crucial aspect of female friendship: the idea that you can always kill a guy and it’ll somehow be okay.
Each of them does it differently. Obviously, The Guy is always bad and always deserves it. But in each show his relation with the main characters is different. The reason to kill is different. The way of killing is different. Even the number of female killers is different.
Desperate Housewives were the first to do it. In 2012, when the show announced its eighth season to be the last one, the writers pulled out all the stops to end it with a bang. It must’ve been hard for them, as the show was known for doing everything spectacularly. Over the course of 8 years, we saw a tornado, a couple of fires, a riot, a plane crash, countless murders and multiple suicides. Each season had its own criminal and mysterious storyline. Some of them were great (like Alfre Woodard’s character who keeps one of her sons in a basement or Dana Delany’s character suspiciously coming back to the neighborhood after many years) and some of them were not-so-great (including the plots of men seeking revenge in seasons 5 and 7). In all of these stories, the four main characters usually played the witnesses or the victims. Therefore, in the final season, the writers’ decided to make Susan (Teri Hatcher), Lynette (Felicity Huffman), Bree (Marcia Cross) and Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) the ones carrying the secret. The season started with the conversation the ladies had in a forest while disposing of the body of Gabrielle’s stepfather. For the first time, the viewers knew everything about the season’s secret and were watching their beloved characters to rather keep it quiet, instead of trying to uncover the secret. It was a risky move, but that’s what made the season interesting. It truly felt like the final secret. It was also good for the characters and the plot of the entire series, as it used the show’s greatest tricks (like getting back to the season one’s infamous I know what you did letter). That was the season of one of Cross’ and Longoria’s best performances. And after seven seasons of stagnity and routine, it actually felt like something new, refreshing and positively terrifying.
Big Little Lies used a similar problem in a hella different way. The show itself is a drama. Its first season was based on a book. From the very first minute the viewers knew that something’s happened. They didn’t know what or who did it. But that’s what the entire season was for. To find out. With a star-studded cast (Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Zoe Kravitz, Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley), it unsurprisingly turned out to be a major HBO hit. The main characters weren’t friends. They didn’t get along well. They all had their own, personal problems they had to deal with. Most of them had secrets concerning their dark past. They weren’t talking to anyone about it. Until the big finale, when they all took a part in killing a guy. The show was supposed to be a limited series. But then Meryl Streep said she wants to be a part of it, so two years later, in 2019 the second season had its premiere. It followed the group of women trying to deal with their common secret. And it wasn’t an easy task, when someone like Meryl Streep arrives in town in the role of a suspicious mother of the killed guy.
And finally, Dead To Me did it as well. The show was all about death from the beginning – it told a story about a friendship between a widow (Christina Applegate) and her husband’s killer (Linda Cardellini). It was full of twists and surprises and it somehow managed to end its first season with the biggest twist ever – the widow kills the bad guy and calls her new friend to help with covering it up. The second season was even more complex than the original one. Similarly to Desperate Housewives, the topic of killing a person is treated with much more comedic attitude than it was in Big Little Lies. It ended with a cliffhanger that opens new possibilities for a new season, however it’s hard to imagine an even twistier season than the two previous ones. Both leading actresses were nominated for an Emmy, making it hard to choose who deserves to win more.
What makes watching women trying to conceal a murder so interesting is the complexity of their actions. Most of the female characters in these three shows were mothers and/or housewives. They all had to struggle with hiding their secret from their husbands and kids. And they all fear at some point about going to prison, dragging their children to court battles just to potentially leave them parentless.
In the majority of cultures, the mother is the one who’s responsible for the kids. The father can run around town and kill everyone they want to and it will have no impact on his kids. The mother is usually the responsible one. And it’s so satisfying to see when she’s not.