Netflix Already Has A Spiritual Successor To ‘Desperate Housewives’–And It’s A Telenovela 

Maybe you’ve heard that Desperate Housewives is getting a reboot. Maybe you haven’t. Either way, it probably didn’t register high on your internal list of Important News Items.

At least, I’m assuming it didn’t come ahead of “New Pope” and “Oh God Why Is The President Doing That Again.” But it’s true! Kerry Washington of Scandal fame is rebooting Desperate Housewives, because good shows can’t just end in satisfying ways anymore and must always be exhumed until everyone is bored. Also, Washington must have heard that executive producing a series or movie is the only way actors can make any money these days.

And while Washington highlights how “new” the series is, the official description suggests otherwise: 

Per Deadline, “Wisteria Lane is described as a fun, sexy, darkly comedic soap/mystery … set among a group of five very different friends and sometimes frenemies who all live on a picture-perfect cul de sac called ‘Wisteria Lane.’ On the surface, all the Wisteria neighbors are living the dream: beautiful homes, gorgeous families, shiny SUVs in the driveway. But behind those white-picket fences and smiling Insta posts are SECRETS.”

That’s not new. That’s literally just the description of the original Desperate Housewives.

If the news of yet another unnecessary remake has you rolling your eyes, do not fret. You don’t need to watch Desperate Housewives 2.0! The spiritual successor to Desperate Housewives already exists and it comes complete with a fresh story and set of characters. It even comes with a new language! It’s called La Casa de las Flores, or The House of Flowers, and it’s a Mexican quasi-telenovela on Netflix. 

Here’s three reasons why you should watch.

Satire sharper than Lady Gaga’s Born This Way cheeks

Just like Desperate Housewives skewers soap operas, La Casa de las Flores skewers telenovelas. It wields its melodrama ironically and with flair, punctuating jokes and raising the show’s stakes. This never grows wearisome and instead leads to some wildly entertaining quarrels and misunderstandings. Meanwhile, it also satirizes the Mexican elites at the center of its story. It pokes fun at their social attitudes and exposes their hypocrisies, just like Desperate Housewives does with the American upper middle class.

Paulina’s voice 

It’s hard to choose just one iconic character from Desperate Housewives, but gun to my head, I’d pick Bree Van de Kamp. Prim and proper to a fault, Bree embodies self-righteous weaponized WASPdom to a tee. Also, that hair. A perfect Omega symbol. 

And just your luck, La Casa de las Flores has its own iconic creation in the form of Paulina de la Mora (Cecilia Suárez). She doesn’t have an iconic look, per se, unless you count her perpetually stoic expression. But her voice! Paulina talks in such a uniquely hyper-enunciated cadence that you’ll notice it even if you don’t understand any Spanish. In fact, when I first watched La Casa de las Flores at the beginning of my Spanish language journey a few years ago, I asked my tutor if Paulina was meant to represent some obscure slow-speaking region of Mexico. Nope, she’s just cray. 

Woke representation, henny

La Casa de las Flores is a very good lewk for Spanish language television, and I’m not just talking about its stylish aesthetic and fierce wardrobe department. I’m talking, of course, about its queer representation. There’s gay daddy pride in the form of Diego (Juan Pablo Medina), bi pride in the form of Julián de la Mora (Darío Yazbek Bernal), and trans pride in the form of María José Riquelme (Paco León). (María José is Paulina’s former husband and now former wife.) On top of that, there are several scandalous steamy same-sex scenes (alliteration unintended, hand to Satan). If that doesn’t make this series a spiritual successor to Desperate Housewives, then I don’t know what is! But also, it’s just a very cool development within the Spanish-speaking TV sphere, given that positive representations of queer people have been historically absent in that space. That’s not to mention the fact that its decision to give María José storylines unrelated to her gender identity is nothing short of revolutionary for such a show.

So, to sum things up … and I’ll say this very slowly, just like Paulina …

You …. should watch … La Casa de las Flores … now!