by Wilfred Okichie

The original Desperate Housewives, a primetime soap created by Marc Cherry, and premiered on ABC in October, 2004 was together with other titles, Grey’s Anatomy and Lost, credited with bringing about a reversal of fortunes for home studio, ABC, placing it once again on the path to financial and ratings success, long before Shonda Rhimes’ explosion into an institution with her Thursday Night Takeovers.

An instant hit, Desperate Housewives’ soapy but super effective mix of female friendships, suburbian dysfunction, vicious domestic rivalry and plain human behaviour observation would capture the imagination of viewers and critics alike, creating a followership the world over that sustained the show through series highs and lows.

By the time the series finale aired in 2012, it was official. In its own way, Desperate housewives had changed the television landscape, becoming the longest running hour long television series featuring all female leads.

While the series was still in production, the first set of spin offs (for Latin American audiences), had began to air, all of them in non-English speaking roles. Ebony Life television’s Desperate Housewives Africa marks the first English language spin off.

Reasons for Mo Abudu’s interest in an African retelling may not be so far-fetched. She won’t say, but her ELTV has struggled with amassing viewership and keeping them in since the channel’s initial honeymoon period.

Desperate Housewives may be one massive push for relevancy from the network. A desperate fan grab, capitalising on the original show’s phenomenon status and sizable African audience. Most of this audience got their fixes from pirated copies and illegal downloads, but it takes only a basic survey among targeted demographics to confirm the show’s popularity on the continent.

However, on watching the pilot episode which aired primetime, recently on ELTV with new episodes every Thursday at 9pm, it is obvious that adapting this future classic, may not be such a hot idea, especially as memories of the groundbreaking original are still fresh.

Whoever thinks 11 years is forever in television time only needs to sit through the awkward procedure of watching hot bodied Omotu Bissong and her destructive brood, attempt to convince viewers that they are a credible stand in for the famously harried family of Lynette Scavo, whose domestic dissatisfaction was played to Emmy winning perfection by Felicity Huffman.

Bissong’s failings as a dramatic actress are glaringly on display in the sophomore episode where she has a meltdown after being stopped by traffic cops.

Where Ms Huffman unforgettably put the unsympathetic male officers in their place without stress, Bissong, a former MBGN, is obviously reading out her lines from the script.

She has not bothered to convince audiences through her acting that she has indeed been stretched to breaking point, and so it is a tad off putting to see this stunning vision, who looks like she walked in to the set, off the runway, pretend to be stressed out of her senses. Nobody is buying that. Nor is anybody buying the idea that she and her husband (Ozzy Agu) could possibly be parents of 4 children.

This presents the first failing of this adaptation.

The casting.

We may be doing suburbia- in Africa’s case- upper upper middle class- but it is hard to believe that a majority of elite African women are as presented here. In a stunning lack of diversity that will emerge to be the show’s identity, all of the women look the same physically.

Beautiful, skinny, sexy and well-spoken. Apart from the buxom, nosy neighbour, the women of Desperate Housewives Africa all aspire to the ready-made, television version that is being forced on the culture. If you are going to show people behaving badly, might as well show beautiful people, seems t be the consensus.

But these beautiful people do not know how to behave badly in an exciting way. Michelle Dede has a physical resemblance to Teri Hatcher, who played Susan Mayer, the slightly neurotic and naive single mother constantly on the look-out for a man, but she is yet to settle in to the wonderful quirks that made Hatcher’s Mayer so relatable.

Kehinde Bankole may be the biggest casting fail here. The role of Gabrielle Solis, the hot to trot trophy wife would be too big for any actress to step into, especially after Eva Longoria made such mincemeat out of it, but it is particularly ill fitting for Bankole, whose natural charms are swallowed up as she struggles to find her rhythm with the character.

It is also hard to imagine how an African actress can do sexy more than the westerners. And so roles like Bankole’s Kiki Obi (Gabrielle Solis)  and Linda Osifo’s Rhetta Moore (Edie Brit) suffer significantly on the road to interpretation by the actresses who play them.

The series is an almost literal scene for scene adaptation, with little flourishes and tweaks added to localize the content. And so, it benefits from the fine, breezy writing which is transplanted from the original.

Much of the hard work is covered already as major plot lines, dialogue, and pivotal events have been taken care of. The challenge hence, lies in how to give the series a wholly African flavour without losing the essence of the original.

This, as the producers have found is tricky business and that struggle to find the right balance will be the show’s major challenge till it’s dying day.

When they get it right, as they do in some moments in the pilot, expect the show to fly. But when they don’t, as the team of writers and transplant surgeons also show with equal aplomb, the show becomes a train wreck waiting to happen.

The original was equal parts comedy and drama. This one struggles with the comedy part. The actors have not quite settled into being the characters and a lot of the deft comic timing needed to carry off the snappy writing is unfortunately, yet to show up.

What we are left with to observe, is African actors trying their best to act like Africans but making use of material prepared for a Caucasian audience. It is a thankless task and it shows mightily on the screen.

Production design is hard to fault but the sound tends to appear like the voices were dubbed and tacked atop the actors performances. Sets feel claustrophobic and from the pilot alone, one can spot the product placement intentions fighting hard to share screen time.

Will Desperate Housewives Africa make like the original and bring its home network out of its content induced narcolepsy? It may be too soon to tell, but if the best feelings a new show elicits is a wistful fondness and an acute hunger to revisit the original material for both unforced inspiration and prime entertainment, then the signs aren’t looking so good are they?

But it is early days yet and there is time enough for a huge turnaround.

May the odds be ever in their favour.