The fab four: why America has fallen for Desperate Housewives.

I CONFESS: I'm hooked. I know what I will be doing this Sunday night at 9 and every other Sunday night for the rest of the season. Along with over 20 million other Americans I will be hunkered down watching ABC's Desperate Housewives, the show that has had the most successful launch, ratings-wise, since Friends started in 1994. And just as Friends was a sign of its times-with its super-groomed, big-city yuppie singles hanging out in a coffee bar and looking for love-Desperate Housewives, with its middle-class suburban wives and mothers, seems to be just right for today.

First of all, Housewives airs on Sunday, the perfect time for such a series. Over the years there have often been television programs, from Ed Sullivan's "really big show" to 60 Minutes, that have helped end the weekend and give viewers something to talk about in the office on Monday morning. Now weekends are more frantic than ever, especially for families with kids. After two days of ferrying children to soccer games and ice-skating lessons, attending church, cooking Sunday dinner for grandparents, and overseeing the homework that never gets done till just before bed on Sunday night, moms all over the country are collapsing on the couch, grateful for a fix of gloriously entertaining chick-TV. And a surprising number of dads, also involved in family activities, must be collapsing right next to them, since the show is also doing well with men.

Why is Desperate Housewives so popular--the first breakthrough series in years? Because it is so shocking, so salacious, so full of steamy sex and sin? Certainly that's what some of its conservative critics maintain. And about a month ago, ABC--purposely I would wager-fueled the controversy with a vulgar little promotion for the show on Monday Night Football that displayed seductive Housewives actress Nicollette Sheridan's bare back and had absolutely nothing to do with the show's plotline.

Since then, if you watch cable TV's rant-and-rave talk shows, you'll have heard, almost every night, a couple of the regular guests preaching to the converted and declaring that Desperate Housewives is leading American families straight to hell-though I doubt many of the most outspoken critics ever bothered to really watch the show before climbing up on their soapboxes.

Some feminists don't like the show much either, complaining that because the four main characters are all "stay-at-home" wives and mothers they are throwbacks to a pre-feminist era. Feminists also decried ABC's "sexist" promotional spot, proving nothing gets more media attention than that rare moment of bad taste that offends both the Right and the Left.

In truth, Housewives owes a lot to both traditional women's magazines and chick-lit novels, which are very popular today-think Bridget Jones and its dozens of imitators. In chick-lit books, friends sustain the wise-cracking heroine until the right guy comes along. In "henlit" books about middle-aged women, friends sustain the wisecracking heroine after she's been dumped by the guy she thought was the right one, helping her realize she is better off without him. In both categories, the supportive relationship between women friends is a key plot ingredient.

It's also the basis for Housewives, in which the four protagonists are close friends and have banded together to try to find out why their fifth friend unexpectedly committed suicide. They are concerned-as real women would be--that they didn't realize their friend was so desperately unhappy. And by the way, the housewives all tend to be in the "henlit" demographic. Trust me, that's also part of the appeal for many female viewers. In recent seasons, bachelor-seeking 20-somethings or apprentice wannabees were all the rage, and women over 30 tended to disappear from TV screens.

The only really naughty housewife is Gabrielle, the richest, best-dressed, and, shall we say, most self-indulgent of the four, all of whom are neighbors on Wisteria Lane. A wisteria, by the way, is a pretty vine, though also a creeper that can take over and ultimately kill a garden. Get the symbolism? At the start of the series Gabrielle's problem was her macho husband who could buy her a diamond necklace but wouldn't listen to her. For years, one of the best cover lines on women's magazines was "How to get him to listen." To deal with this lack of "emotional intimacy," as a women's magazine would put it, Gabrielle turned to John, the 17-year-old hunky gardener, for consolation. And no, she and John don't talk much.

But one of the other housewives, Susan--the ditziest of the four, whose husband left her for a younger woman--has found out about this little affair. In a recent episode she gave Gabrielle a tongue-lashing about her immoral behavior, and wouldn't buy Gabrielle's "my husband doesn't understand me" explanation of why she strayed. "That's a rationalization," she snapped during their confrontation. And even though Susan is most of the time the klutz who provides comic relief and is supposed to be so incompetent she can't cook anything more challenging than mac and cheese, she knows right from wrong.

And that is also key to the appeal of the show and part of what makes it so reflective of today. Unlike the glitzy nighttime soap operas of the '80s (think Dallas and Dynasty), in which the rich and powerful outwitted each other with dastardly deeds and gained from their villainy, this show is about ordinary women trying to be good and to raise good children, women who feel guilty when they or their kids behave badly.

One of the other housewives, Bree--a Martha Stewart clone who still wears her hair in an early-'60s Smith College-girl flip--is so worried about her callow son's moral character that she tipped the school authorities off to the stash of pot he had stored in his gym locker so they would kick him off the swim team. And now Gabrielle is discovering that her untalkative husband has some big problems with the feds, and that she may be more sinned against than sinning.

But the real heroine of the show and, I guarantee, the crowd's favorite is Lynette, a former corporate go-getter with a husband who travels nonstop and four rambunctious kids. Lynette was once a big-paycheck success; now she is trying unsuccessfully to handle her Twin Boys from Hell. Yes, she really, really wants to be "just a mom," and a good one at that, like millions of other women. But raising kids is tough, demanding, exhausting work--something the feminists never really appreciated.

The show's creator and executive producer, Marc Cherry, who has been described "a somewhat conservative, gay Republican," said his own mom-"a perfect wife and mother"--told him she had "moments of great desperation when ... my dad was off getting a master's degree in Oklahoma and she was alone with three kids--five, four, and three--who were just bouncing off the walls." Mom says about her son's show: It's "closer to reality than most of the reality shows."

And yes, Lynette did get hooked on the kids' ADD meds but got clean with the help of her friends. Now she is worried that the nanny she hired in a moment of desperation may not be as capable as she seems. This is a nighttime soap in which the most popular female character wears sweats, not glitz, and worries about whether she can trust not her man but her nanny. Does that say something about our family-centric times?

Of course, these housewives are not a true reflection of today's American women. In recent episodes the show's plotline has gotten trickier, and the husbands have turned out to be sleazier. And at least once an episode one of the housewives manages to turn up in Victoria's Secret underwear. But the four remain likable, so viewers are entertained by them and not turned off by their flaws. They are not like the heroines on the Lifetime channel's soppy "victim-of-the-day movies" who are always being abused by bad husbands, bad boyfriends, or bad doctors. These girls can be shrewd and tough. They want to stay married, even when their guys are not the greatest (though I've noticed the show is beginning to veer into "you're better off without him" hen-lit territory). They love their kids desperately, even when those kids are behaving their worst. They want to be good, caring friends. Basically, one feels that like most American wives and mothers they would prefer to have traditional lifestyles, and try for the most part to maintain traditional values. If a pollster had wandered by Wisteria Lane in late October, I bet three out of four of them would have said they were voting for George W. Bush.

And let's not ignore the fact that, as a show, Desperate Housewives is very well acted and has a witty script with writing as crisp as one of Bree's 500-thread Egyptian-cotton bed sheets. It garnered five Golden Globe nominations, including one for best comedy series. And one week it beat the finale of CBS's Survivor: Vanuatu in the ratings. Who wouldn't applaud the housewives for doing no more than that?

Myrna Blyth, the former editor of Ladies' Home Journal, is a contributor to National Review Online and the author of Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness-and Liberalism-to the Women of America.