I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily show that would be on otherwise).

17: Desperate Housewives

I remember the first year of Desperate Housewives. It was huge - and a sensation - something people were talking about it. Who Wants to Be A Millionaire was bigger in its time in that more people watched it, but it's not like if you were at work the next day there would be much to talk about it. But if I had been around a water cooler back in the fall of 2004, this is what people would have been talking about. Well, essentially this and Lost (particularly comparable as the biggest ABC scripted successes of the decade). And we all know what happened - one of them went on to be hugely buzzworthy for a couple of years, fell out of favor, and then after announcing when its finale would be, became a cause celebre in its final season, and the other one was Desperate Housewives.

Or so the narrative seems, and that's what I thought I'd find, in terms of ratings. But the story is totally untrue. While it seems like everyone I know and read was talking about Lost, Desperate Housewives was still cranking out better ratings, and it honestly wasn't even that close. Lost, which I would have thought, would have climbed in the ratings during the last season when everyone was buzzing after every single episode, had its lowest rated season yet, while Desperate Housewives, whose ratings were still down relatively (what non-American Idol shows aren't, these days) finished in the top 15.

It was an interesting idea when it came out - the classic trashy primetime soup but this time with a dark comedy satiric spin. Sure, lots of primetime soaps before had not necessary taken themselves super seriously, but not usually with this type of angle. The narrator was the recently dead Mary Alice Young, who killed herself under mysterious circumstances which are the first season mystery (each season seems to have some sort of overarching plot, while there are many smaller plots within). The Desperate Housewives I have seen pretty much came during the first and maybe beginning of second seasons with my parents, who watched it at the time. Anyway, there was all sorts of little of these little dark mysteries - people trying to kill each other and such, lightened by the sense of satire.

Everyone knew Wisteria Lane and the ladies of Desperate Housewives became kind of a famous individually and as a group, though some more than others - it was kind of a comeback for Teri Hatcher, and Eva Longoria probably became the most famous, in addition to her tabloid-drawing romance with basketball point guard Tony Parker, but Marcia Cross and Felicity Huffman also (and to a lesser extent, Nicolette Sheridan - as sports fans by remember from this incredibly strange and ill-advised ABC syngeristic pre-Monday Night Football promo - I was just going to link but after watching it again -if you haven't seen it this is such a must-watch that I'm just embedding it below this:

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Honestly, I can't top that. I really want to end on that note, and I don't have much else to say (bunch of characters die? crazy mysteries?), so I'm going to.