Characters / Desperate Housewives - Housewives

Main Character Index Housewives | Families | Other Characters

Beware, spoilers are unmarked!

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The four main housewives

As a group

The main protagonists of the show, four housewives and friends inhabiting Wisteria Lane, a street in a suburbia of the East Coast city of Fairview.

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• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Lynette (blonde) and Bree (redhead), with Gaby and Susan, are both brunettes.
• Card Games: They have their own weekly ritual, a gathering to play cards and talk and gossip. They alternate homes every week to host it.
• Deadpan Snarker: They're all prone to snark, even (or especially) at each other. Given how fucked up pretty much everyone's life is in Wisteria Lane, it might help them to cope.
• Doom Magnet: Their lives alternate between happy, boring, and miserable, and the "miserable" (or desperate, hence the show's title) part often prevails, turning into "horrible" more than once.
• Four-Girl Ensemble: The original housewives, Bree, Susan, Lynette, and Gaby.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Susan is "Sanguine", Lynette is "Phlegmatic", Bree is "Melancholic" and Gabrielle is "Choleric". Mary-Alice is "Leukine."
  • In the fourth season of the show, Katherine challenges Bree's melancholic position in the group.
  • Bree would be more sensibly classified as choleric in the eighth season of the show.
• Housewife: Each one of them is a different kind of stay-at-home wife initially, with Bree being the closest in mind to the archetype (in the early seasons, that is). The "housewife" denomination technically becomes The Artifact whenever one of them takes a job, but then, usually, something happens and she resumes being a housewife. All of them spent more time in their life being housewives than being working women with perhaps the exception of Lynette.
• Mama Bear: All of them.
  • Susan goes ballistic whenever a member of her family is harmed.
  • Bree turns a gun on anyone who messes with her children.
  • Lynette reacts this way when she demonstrates she would kill a man to keep her son safe in season five.
  • Even Gaby seems to be a subversion but has major moments of this when she wants to protect Juanita and Celia.
  • Mary-Alice killed herself (and killed a woman) to prevent Zach from being taken away from her.
  • All of the "new" housewives seem to have "mama bear" as their default setting:
    • Angie is determined to keep her son away from Patrick, and out of prison even if he is the Fairview Strangler.
    • Betty in Season 2 keeps her son in the basement but only to stop him from being arrested and mistreated in prison because she thinks he killed someone.
• Protagonist-Centred Morality: Every single one of them has their moments of serious self-centered Jerkassery:
  • Susan lets Mike take the fall for killing Lila Dash.
  • Bree forces Orson to go to prison for hitting Mike Delfino, although he survived in spite of the fact that Bree chose to cover up Andrew's hit-and-run of Juanita Solis, who did die.
  • Lynette repeatedly insists that Tom is in the wrong when the average person wouldn't be able to tell the difference between their opinions, and refuses to compromise ever.
  • Gaby calls Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Grace's loving and supportive parents just because she wants Grace all to herself, despite having two other daughters.
• Odd Friendship: They are the best of friends despite huge differences in temperament and in the way each one of them handles life.
• Sixth Ranger: Susan, Lynette, Bree and Gaby remain the main protagonists throughout the eight seasons, but some other housewives join them in prominence for a lesser number of seasons such as Edie Britt, Katherine Mayfair or Renee Perry.
• The Power of Friendship: When one goes through hardships, she can count on the support of the others.
• True Companions: They really care for each other at the end of the day.

Susan

Susan Delfino (formerly Mayer, née Bremmer)

Played by: Teri Hatcher

Dubbed by: Claire Guyot (French)

"It was common knowledge on Wisteria Lane that where Susan Mayer went, bad luck was sure to follow. Her misfortunes ranged from the commonplace, to the unusual, to the truly bizarre."

— Mary Alice Young

Known for being a hopeless romantic and a klutz, as well as for her occasional portrayal of the "damsel in distress", Susan is arguably the most fragile of all the housewives, and is often considered the nicest and most adorable one. At least, on the outside.

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• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Her ex-husband Karl, who manages to get her back several times, is an oily serial cheater, and her main love interest is Mike, a hired criminal.
• Audience Surrogate: Fulfils this more than any other housewife. Despite being a clumsy ditz whose creative job is not very lucrative, she lives in a lavish suburban house, serially attracts gorgeous men (some of whom are extremely wealthy), and is given the most leeway when it comes to facing the consequences of her actions.
• Billy Needs an Organ: After being trampled during the riot that happened over Paul Young's project of home for former convicts, she badly needs a kidney transplant. It eventually happens, when Beth Young commits suicide at the hospital and donates her organs.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Susan is just as bitchy as the other Housewives, yet she's the one who tends to get away with it because of how "cute" and "klutzy" she is.
• Born Unlucky: Dear God. While events tend to work against her, most of the time her troubles are solved rather easily and/or aren't as serious as some suffered by her fellow neighbors (barring her liver issues). Though she does have romantic issues in spades, and in the final season, Mike is killed, leaving her to raise her son all by herself.
• Break the Cutie: Life in Wisteria Lane can be cruel and hit even the nicest and well-intentioned folks, and she's no exception.
• Butt-Monkey: She is incredibly unlucky and her suffering is Played for Laughs. She has romantic issues, liver issues, being forced out of the lane, and friendship troubles in the last season and not being able to deal with things in the final season.
• Can't Take Criticism: Any time someone criticizes Susan for her behavior, she has a complete meltdown and denies it, no matter how true it is.
  • In Season Three, when a camp guide calls Susan out on her Drama Queen tendencies, Susan responds by storming off in the mountains alone and predictably gets lost - only Mike managing to find her stops her from dying of hypothermia.
  • When Mike's mother visits in Season Four, she points out that Mike breaks his back bringing in extra money to pay for everything and it wouldn't kill Susan to get a decent paying job - she's right, as we never see Susan doing any work and previously Mike was taking painkillers because he worked so much that it was aggravating his back injury. Susan responds by faking going into labor and then demanding Mike get rid of Adele for making Susan "crazy".
• Cat Fight: She has one with Katherine over Mike in early season 6.
• The Chew Toy: Because Butt-Monkey really isn't enough and her antics are the funniest.
• Cute Clumsy Girl: Falls over herself and objects so much that it's possible she has a genuine disorder that effects her balance.
• Deadpan Snarker: Occasionally.
  Edie: I have a husband now.
  Susan: Really? Whose?
• Damsel in Distress: Always, especially noticeable when she's attacked by Zach in Season 2, nearly killed by Dave in Season 5, and Eddie thinks he's attacked her in Season 8.
• The Ditz: To a ridiculous extent. Can also be combined with Brainless Beauty (she is considered one of the more beautiful and attractive housewives), but there's a lot she doesn't know or doesn't care to know; Julie has to balance her check book for her at just thirteen years old.
• Divorce Is Temporary: She ended up remarrying her show-long Love Interest Mike Delfino. Subverted with Karl, her first husband.
• Doom Magnet: Susan is at the center of every mystery: she falls in love with Mike in Season 1, she's held hostage by Zach in Season 2, Mike gets hit by a car in Season 3 and she falls in love with a man mourning the death of his comatose wife, while in Season 5, she's the main object of Dave's revenge plan. To be fair, this is often her own fault because she constantly butts into things that aren't her business and inevitably makes things worse.
• Dude Magnet: Susan seems to elicit a lot of male attention over the series run. Mike, Karl, Dr Ron, Ian, Jackson, Bill (Edie's Construction Worker in Season 1) and Eddy.
• Easily Forgiven: No matter what Susan does, she always gets forgiven by her friends and family no matter how many times she's done something stupid or hurtful. Lampshaded by Lynette.
  Lynette: You can't just come over here and cute your way out of this!
• Fag Hag: When Bob and Lee move in, Susan is excited to become this. Though this only irritates them and cause them to seriously dislike her. By season five though, she and Lee become decent friends.
• Floorboard Failure: Susan managed to suspend herself between two floors when it happened to her in her house.
• Hand-or-Object Underwear: The plant she used to cover herself after the towel she was wearing got caught in Karl's car door as he drove away.
• Family-Friendly Stripper: She becomes one in Season 7 to cope with her and Mike's poor financial situation.
• Girl Next Door: Literally to Mike.
• Hypocrite: Several times over the course of the series.
  • When Lynette wants Susan to vote for her as head of the homeowners association over Katherine, Susan responds that "friends don't put each other in that position", even though Susan once guilt-tripped Julie into choosing her to accompany her during her music recital at church over Edie, even though Susan doesn't play a musical instrument, or once insisted Gaby go on a date with her Stalker with a Crush to try and persuade him to pay Mike's bail.
  • She gives a lot of Slut-Shaming to Edie, even though Susan's love life is very varied, but she even cheated on Mike when he was in a coma. She also frequently overreacts whenever Julie starts seeing boys, even though she frequently talks about her sex life to her teenaged daughter.
  • She is outraged when Edie burns down her house, even though Edie points out that Susan did the same thing to her back in Season One (it was an accident, granted, but the whole fire started because Susan snuck into Edie's house when she thought Edie and Mike were sleeping together and didn't confess until months after it happened).
  • Susan gets angry with Jackson when he wants to marry her to gain a US citizenship so he won't get deported to Canada, even though Susan remarried Karl so she could benefit from his life-insurance.
• Informed Attractiveness: While Teri Hatcher is very pretty, the other housewives are equally or even more so; yet Susan seems to have the most men fawning over how attractive she is.
• It's All About Me: She is very selfish and will often demand people put what they're doing on hold and pay attention to her, insists on inserting herself into every situation possible to be the center of attention and always assumes people are out to get her.
  Edie: Typical, Susan always finds a way to make it about her.
• The Klutz: Firmly cemented as this when one of her first actions in the series was accidentally burning down someone's house.
• Lethal Chef: On the very opposite spectrum of Bree, she is downright dreadful at cooking.
• Love Makes You Evil: Well, more "bitchy" than "evil", but Susan has done some pretty horrible things in the name of winning/saving/getting back Mike. Examples include burning down Edie's house (albeit on accident) when she thought they were sleeping together, calling the cops and implicating Orson for killing Monique to try and save Mike (the other major suspect) from going to jail, pressuring Gaby into going on a date with her Stalker with a Crush to try and persuade him to pay Mike's bail, etc. Bree even lampshades it:
  Bree: Boy, when it comes to Mike, there's nobody you won't betray.
• Mama Bear: She always stands in the way of troubled that would hit either Julie or MJ.
• Ms. Fanservice: At least once a season, there is a scene where she is wearing a limited amount of clothing. This is invoked when she starts working as a cam girl in Season 7.
• Naked People Trapped Outside: In "Pretty Little Picture", Susan ends up naked in front of her house when her towel gets stuck in Karl's car door. He drives off and leaves Susan behind naked. She panics and runs toward her house which is locked and secretly tries to get back in before someone catches her. She holds a potted plant in front of her body and tries the back door, which is locked as well. Then she tries to climb to the window but falls into her bushes and is discovered by Mike who helps her out and manages to get her back into the house by jimmying a window.
• Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Susan's Cute Clumsy Girl act helps her from being recognized and called out for her worst traits by most people, how a "Karen" weaponizes her privilege when she is really a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who cannot handle criticism and behaves in a hypocritical manner. Edie calls her out on this in Season 1.
  Edie: I'm still the outsider that doesn't get invited to the cool parties, and you're still the perky cheerleader who thinks that she can pull the wool over everyone's eyes.
• Official Couple: With Mike. It's pretty obvious they'll always get back together.
• Parental Hypocrisy: She always freaks out over Julie's love life and forbids Julie from dating boys, even though she always discusses her own love life in front of her daughter and Susan has had plenty of boyfriends over the course of the show - Edie even calls Susan out in the fifth season for constantly needing a man in her life.
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl: Due to being a Butt-Monkey, Susan often ends up suffering embarrassing Wardrobe Malfunctions while in public and having dramatic Naked Freak Outs. This is usually played for humor as well as Fanservice. Examples include her getting her dress ripped in an event or giving her friends unintentional Naked First Impression. The most well know incident involved her getting her Modesty Towel snagged away while she's on the sidewalk and her house was locked, leaving her in a Naked People Trapped Outside situation with only Scenery Censor and Hand-or-Object Underwear to preserve her modesty, something she would never live down In-Universe.
• Secretly Selfish: Frequently.
  • Lampshaded by Edie when she sarcastically congratulates Susan for lying to Mike over his search for Zach, when actually she gave him money to go away to Utah so she could keep him away from her and Julie, but carries on pretending to help look for him.
  • Susan once kidnapped her neighbor's dog so she could stage a rescue to make them like her.

• Starving Artist: She doesn't make much money from her children's books.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • So many times, notably when Julie is stuck inside during a shooting at the supermarket, and Susan decides to start screaming through a microphone to save Julie's life.
  • Susan copes with her trauma about covering up Gaby's abusive stepfather's murder by painting a picture of the other housewives and herself burying him in the woods. That's not so bad by itself, but then she stupidly decides to exhibit it.
• Took a Level in Kindness: In Season 7. While Susan has always somewhat been warm and compassionate, she could be very selfish and self-absorbed when she wanted to be. It wasn't really until after her kidney transplant that her "kindness" was highlighted.
• Unlimited Resources: Although she apparently doesn't make much money from her artist career, she still can keep up with the other housewives, possibly because of Karl's spousal support and then Mike working overtime to support her, himself and Julie.
• Wacky Parent, Serious Child: The "wacky parent" of Julie (and later MJ)'s "serious child". She was also the (more) serious child to her mother's "wacky parent".
• Walking Disaster Area: Being poster girl for The Klutz tends to cause this. She once managed to SET A HOUSE ON FIRE out of sheer clumsiness.
• Will They or Won't They?: Her and Mike have an on-and-off relationship through the entire show's duration. Even when they get together, something breaks them up and they get new Love Interests while still pinning for the other, only to get back together again and the cycle repeats.
• Womanchild: She is extremely immature and needs to be parented by Julie, her teenage daughter, most of the time. MJ then later takes this role as well, proving that Susan still hasn't grown up.

Lynette

Lynette Scavo (née Lindquist)

Played by: Felicity Huffman

Dubbed by: Caroline Beaune (French, all seasons bar early season 5), Marie Vincent (French, early season 5)

"She used to see herself as a career woman. And a hugely successful one at that. She was known for her power lunches, her eye-catching presentations and her ruthlessness in wiping out the competition. Lynette gave up her career to assume a new label: the incredibly satisfying role of full-time mother."

— Mary Alice Young

Mostly known for being super controlling, with a tendency to slightly berate people she holds dear to her heart, Lynette is a neurotic, stressed and controlling businesswoman who put her career on hold to become a housewife and mother.

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• A Day in Her Apron: Played with. Lynette returns to the corporate world and business worlds, but Tom, even when he raises their kids, either doesn't do it to Lynette's standards or Lynette is still needed for something.
• Badass Pacifist: In Season 6, she used speech to reason Eddie's killer nature for her safe being pregnant. He finally decides to turn himself to the police. This act possibly saved other women of Wisteria Lane.
• Baldness Means Sickness: Exploited. Lynette's twins put bubblegum in their brother's hair, so she has to shave it off. People assume Parker has cancer, which Lynette uses to play on their sympathies.
• Berserk Button: She reacts very badly to anyone criticizing her parenting skills.
• Big Damn Heroes: Saved Celia during the airplane crash episode and also Anne Schilling from domestic abuse in 5x08.
• Career Versus Family: The main issue of her arc throughout every season.
• Catfishing: Lynette catfishes Parker (her son) by pretending to be a fellow teenage girl to get him to open up to her. She's shocked when he develops a serious crush on her made-up persona and lets him down gently. (Tom calls her out on how stupid it was not to think this might backfire.)
• Clingy Jealous Girl: She's so convinced that Tom might be tempted by other women that she sabotages his promotion at his job because it would have meant he was working with his attractive ex, she becomes extremely insecure when Gabriel jokingly kisses Tom during a party and has a minor spat with her over it and tends to become especially overbearing whenever she feels threatened by other women.
• Control Freak: She can't stand when things don't go the way she intends them to go in her household. Sometimes it's justified, for instance with some immature antics of Porter and Preston and both of them being The Thing That Would Not Leave. But as for Tom, even though he can be really immature, she practically emasculates him by always assuming she knows what he really needs while she actually doesn't.
• Convenient Miscarriage: An odd example in that she was pregnant with twins, but one of them died in-utero.
• Deadpan Snarker: She often snarkily sends the pity or criticisms of others back in their face in light of her having the biggest and most stressful household to manage.
• Fatal Flaw: Her Control Freak tendencies and hot temper bite her in the ass a lot over the course of the series.
• Flanderization: Her Control Freak tendencies are exaggerated in Season 5 and 7.
• Freudian Excuse: Lynette being reluctant to be tough on her kids and overindulging them comes from having an abusive drunk of a mother who would beat her and her sisters.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Sort of a running gag with her character is how increasingly annoyed/inconvenienced she is with each one of her several pregnancies, though she apparently never considers abortion.
• High-Powered Career Woman: Lynette is presented as a very successful marketing executive, Depending on the Writer. Before getting married, she was something of a business shark, but she gave that up before the start of the show to be a House Wife. Her main storylines often revolve around Family Versus Career conflicts and the strain they place on her marriage to Tom, made all the more dire as she has five children to help parent. In the first season alone she sabotages a promotion Tom would receive that would take him away from the home more often, which leads to him becoming a Househusband and her returning back to work.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Lynette can be very neurotic and controlling, but she genuinely wants the best for her family.
• Kick the Dog:
  • After Lynette demands room in Karen's basement during the tornado, which Karen had already agreed to share with Ida, Tom realizes Ida's pet cat is also in the basement with them and he's allergic. When Ida refuses to put the cat outside, Lynette waits until Ida falls asleep and proceeds to put Toby outside, in a tornado, herself. Karen calls her out on it.
  • When Tom's mother Allison comes to stay, she starts annoying Lynette by trying to teach Penny to cook, waits on Tom and the boys hand and foot and comments that when she was married to Tom's father, she had the house spotless and dinner waiting on the table when he came home every day. Lynette retorts that obviously this didn't count for much when he cheated on her and walked out. The entire family reacts with appalled silence and Allison leaves the room in tears. Even Lynette is disgusted with what she said.
• Lady in a Power Suit: When she returns to corporate jobs, she always wears one.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: She is the housewife who has the most children out of all the protagonists, due to having a number of unexpected pregnancies (although she's not the one wishing she had no kids). Even obvious lack of contraception with Tom aside, she seems to be very fertile even past 40 (going by the actress' age).
  Karen McCluskey: (to Lynette) No offense, but you should be sterilized.
• Mama Bear: She will personally face any threat to her children right in the eyes.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: She's the masculine girl to Tom's feminine boy - though he isn't a particularly effeminate man, he still qualifies as he's the mediator and the laidback one to Lynette's dominating, no-nonsense personality.
• Motherhood Is Superior: Lynette tends to act as though she's the only one who gets final say on how to raise her children and Tom's input is an afterthought. She also reacts with dismissive scorn when Tom reveals he's been smoking medicinal marijuana to help with his post-natal depression, sarcastically telling him it must have been so hard to carry and birth their daughter.
• My Beloved Smother: She falls into this occasionally although she is generally only trying to look out for Tom and her kids, although she can be overbearing.
• Nervous Wreck: Comes with having the most numerous family, a manchild of a husband whose plans never work and all while not having the coolest temper. That and living in the doom magnet that is Wisteria Lane.
• Never My Fault: She always thinks Tom is responsible for everything.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In Season 3, Lynette organizes a demonstration against the supposedly pedophile swimming coach. It manages to kill his sister thus terminate his only reason to restrain himself.
• Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Played with. She started off as more of a deconstruction of the idea; while she did PTA and had a brood of uncontrollable kids, she was very unhappy with the amount of pressure that she felt under to do everything like that and she was often stood up to characters who fell into this bracket. However, she also bounced backwards and forwards between the idea, such as when she was so concerned about her son's romantic life that she posed as a girl his own age online (and caused him to fall in love with her...) and she frequently made excuses for her sons' wild behavior.
• Parents as People: She genuinely adores her kids, but she also struggles to raise them and is frequently overwhelmed by them, to the point of (sometimes) neglecting them.
• Pregnant Badass: She pushes Celia out of the way of a crashed plane barreling down the street while pregnant with twins. Unfortunately, the event causes her to miscarry one of those twins.
  • A later example finds her convincing a serial killer, a very troubled boy she befriended, to help her deliver her baby, save said baby's life, and winds up convincing him to turn himself in.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The "red" to Tom's "blue".
• Team Mom: As the parent with the most kids and the most "responsible" outlook, Lynette was this throughout the show.
• Therapy Is for the Weak: She carries this attitude, being very dismissive of the idea of discussing her problems with anyone and she only thinks about counselling for Kayla and later Eddie when it's far too late. Lynette is also reluctant to medicate her extremely rowdy children because she worries it would "change" them too much. She also threw out Tom's medicinal marijuana because she didn't think he "needed" it to deal with his depression.
• Town Girls: The Butch to her sister Lucy's Neither and her sister Lydia's Femme.
• Stepford Snarker: Although it doesn't really fool anyone, this is Lynette's preferred method for showing how unhappy she is at times, especially with her kids and Tom.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Lynette has always been kinda controlling, but nearing the end of season 7, manipulating Tom into walking out on Carlos, using increasingly manipulative and shrewish behavior crossed a few lines.
• Women Are Wiser: It's an Informed Attribute, but she is frequently supposed to be this for her husband and sons.

Bree

Bree Weston (formerly Van de Kamp and Hodge, née Mason)

Played by: Marcia Cross, Mackenzie Brooke Smith (age 10)

Dubbed by: Blanche Ravalec (French)

"I remember the easy confidence of her smile, the gentle elegance of her hands, the refined warmth of her voice. But what I remember most about Bree was the look of fear in her eyes. Bree had started to realize her world was unraveling. And for a woman who despised loose ends, that was unacceptable."

— Mary Alice Young

Wisteria Lane's resident neurotic and perfectionist homemaker, whose strong resolve, traditional values and proper demeanor are both her greatest assets as well as the source of nearly all her personal troubles. She describes herself as the "domestic housewife" out of the group.

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• The '50s: Her look, moreso in the earlier seasons: A-line skirts and dresses, twin-sets with pearls, white gloves, her "flip" hair-do, etc.
• Abusive Parents: Bree mentions that her stepmother was an extremely cold woman who was emotionally abusive. She also displays emotionally abusive tendencies towards her kids, especially her horrified reaction when Andrew comes out as a gay and bluntly telling Danielle there's nothing much to her besides her looks. She eventually does admit she massively screwed up when it comes to her children and strives to be a better parent to Benjamin.
• Acceptable Feminine Goals and Traits: Deconstructed. Bree is an excellent cook, seamstress, and cleaner, but she also seriously struggles with feeling like she needs to live up to this.
• The Ace: Everybody in the neighborhood is impressed (even envious) of Bree's numerous talents. Among other things, she excels at homekeeping, cooking, gardening, making her own clothes and reupholstering furniture. She's also a cultured and refined woman who dresses impeccably and is a very good markswoman.
• The Alcoholic: Develops in season 2, plus the occasional relapse. There was her slip during the time jump, and Bree's arc in season 8 has her falling off the wagon pretty hard.
• Anorgasmia: She never experienced a true orgasm in her life. Orson changed things in that department in Season 3.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: With her family members. During Season Four, when Danielle is in labor, she calls for Bree, who rushes to her side without a thought and calls her "baby", when they'd been at each other's throats hours ago. And after Danielle gives birth, Bree gently asks if Danielle is rethinking giving away Benjamin, even though she desperately wants to be a mother again herself. Danielle tearfully says she knows it's the best thing to do for everyone.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Impeccably polite, though often reveals a conservatively judgmental, imperious side to her personality.
• Born in the Wrong Century: She romanticizes the 1950s and 60s, dressing in this fashion and behaving like a true Proper Lady to go along with it.
• Break the Haughty: Her early seasons' storylines comprise this: she learns that Rex is cheating on her, then he dies from a heart attack, then she learns that he was murdered by her stalker, she kills him, she becomes an alcoholic...
• Broken Ace: Several times, notably when she becomes an alcoholic, when she and Orson's relationship goes bad, when she's being blackmailed in Season 8.
• Cartwright Curse: One surefire way to predict if a male character is going to die is judged by one question: is he Bree's Love Interest? Of her eight love interests, four of them have died and one ended up in a wheelchair. Lampshaded in a season five promo, where the paperboy recaps the events of the past four seasons, and ends his recap of Bree with "I hope Orson doesn't die, too". She even lampshades it herself during season 7:
  Bree: My track record with lovers... two dead, one in a wheelchair.
• Churchgoing Villain: Although she's never exactly a villain, she participates in a lot of un-Christian activity, such as covering up several deaths, leaving her lover to die, abandoning her son...
• Church Lady: Extremely dedicated to the church, attending every Sunday and forming a close relationship with Reverend Sykes. Although less traditionally sweet than the purely positive Church Lady and more judgmental and hypocritical, she's a Proper Lady with strong values, even if she doesn't always meet them herself.
• Control Freak: Bree is a perfectionist and demands the same for her family, and her attempts to control their lives to fit her criteria border on neurosis.
• Deadpan Snarker: Her children's behavior provides her huge amounts of reasons to snark in the early seasons.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Bree is very repressed about her feelings, but they eventually come out due to the sheer amount she endures.
• Despair Event Horizon: During season 8, with her ex-boyfriend cop harassing her (and explicitly doing it in order to make her feel miserable) and the loss of her friends, Bree relapses into alcoholism, and in the 9th episode she ends up alone in a hotel room, with only a bottle of wine and a gun, speaking to an imaginary Mary Alice (or her ghost?) and contemplating the idea of suicide.
• Driven to Suicide: By the 9th-10th episode of season 8, she's on the verge of committing suicide, but Renee's timely arrival prevents this.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Andrew forgives her immediately for ditching him in Season 3, even though it forced him into prostitution when he was underage (although he was a total monster, which he admits, it can still be a little jarring to see him say Bree was right to do it.)
  • Deconstructed by Rex in Season 1. His final act is to write that he loves and forgives Bree for poisoning him...the problem is, she didn't, but now they have a smoking gun that makes everyone think she did.
• Establishing Character Moment: Bree's first dinner scene with her family speaks volumes about who she is. She's shown to be an inflexible autocrat, ignoring her children's suggestion for a simpler meal (even though she could easily cook what they asked for) and it becomes obvious that she cooks her elaborate meals because that is what she wants and enjoys, not what her family needs. Her inflexibility, I-know-best attitude and refusal to consider her family members' opinions and needs are her main flaws.
• Fake Pregnancy: Bree stages one as part of a Family Relationship Switcheroo.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: Bree sent her pregnant daughter to a convent and pretended to be pregnant herself. She actually managed to get away with it... for a while. Eventually everyone who mattered found out by the end of the season and Danielle took the baby back between seasons. Note that the use of this trope was a deliberate anachronism; the show is a comedy, after all.
• Fatal Flaw: Bree's inability to face her own problems, her Control Freak tendencies and her habit of going totally overboard with anybody who crosses her result in the bulk of her problems over the course of the series.
• Feminine Women Can Cook: She is a brilliant chef, as everyone remarks, and she also has the most traditionally feminine façade.
• Fiery Redhead: When she wants to be, though Bree is also the most reserved and demure of the housewives.
• Freudian Excuse: Her mother died traumatically when she was 5 and her stepmother was a distant and unloving woman. Though she got better than them, eventually.
• Gentlewoman Snarker: Bree is unfailingly polite but that doesn't stop her from serving some sarcasm.
• Go-Getter Girl: An adult version, arguably.
• Good Girl Gone Bad: She started off the show as a deeply moral - albeit hypocritical - perfect housewife. She became the "bad" bad in stages, such as when she covered up Andrew's hit-and-run, but she also defrosted into being the "fun" bad.
• Gun Nut: She knows how to use guns, and she has a shotgun under her bed. It's not at all out of the realm of possibilities that she has a NRA membership.

• Hair-Trigger Temper: A consistent Fatal Flaw for Bree is she responds to being challenged or provoked in any way with Disproportionate Retribution, which tends to drive a wedge between her friends and family - particularly in regards to Andrew, and the situation constantly escalates between them as they build up resentment towards each other over the constant Blackmail, insults and manipulation.

• Happily Married: It appears to finally be the case after her marriage with Trip Weston at the very end of the series in Mary Alice's final narration. She and Orson were also temporarily this, especially throughout Seasons 3 and 4.
• Hiding Behind Religion: Although a rarely positive version, Bree seems to default to religion to provide order in her life.
• Holier Than Thou: Bordering on Churchgoing Villain at times, Bree is a highly repressed housewife who is extremely judgemental of others in spite of her own personal problems, especially noticeably after she covers up Andrew's hit-and-run, spirals into alcoholism, and abandons Andrew.
• Housewife: Obviously. She's the most classic example in the series and evokes the archetypal 1950's housewife.
• Hypocrite: She is horrified by Orson putting Mike in a coma, even though she covered up Andrew's fatal car accident, and Mike himself forgave Orson - she just couldn't bring herself to. She is extremely judgmental of others, even though she raised her wild child daughter's son for her rather than face the shame.
• The Immodest Orgasm: The fact her orgasms manifest as incredibly loud screeches that can be heard across the neighborhood become a Running Gag.
• Lady Drunk: During season 8, the tension between the girls became so high that she ended becoming their scapegoat, and finally they abandoned her. She then relapses hard into alcoholism. She was on the verge of suicide, but is stopped just in time, thanks to the intervention of Renee. Now, she views herself as lost, not knowing anymore who she is. Slowly, she is deconstructing herself, and is becoming ''easy'', something she acknowledges. She didn't even deny when an angry spouse called her a whore (truth to be told, she was quite drunk at that time, but she doesn't seems to care at all, if the end of the 12th episode is any indication).
• Lady of War: As best shown by how quickly she reaches for her gun when Danielle is in danger, but present throughout. She's constantly polite and ladylike, but she's also a brilliant shot who is not ashamed to show it when she needs to.
• Love Hurts: Despite the perfect façade, she is consistently unlucky in love.
  Rex Van De Kamp: Bree, I can't live in this detergent commercial anymore!
• Mama Bear: She can step up to be badass in the name of her children, as shown by her completely unflustered reaction when Andrew kills someone.
• My Beloved Smother: Although the "beloved" part is hotly debated throughout the show, Bree is also intensely controlling, micromanaging every part of her kids' lives even after she has driven them away from her.
• Neat Freak: She can't stand seeing dirtiness.
• Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: In a Happy Marriage Charade with her doctor husband Rex, Bree initially henpecks him, is obsessively clean, nosy, and is furious when her (spoiled, bordering on sociopathic) kids want to go to a restaurant rather than eat her home-cooked food. She has extremely traditional values and doesn't take Andrew coming out as gay well, but she is also desperate to maintain her status within the neighborhood. After Rex's death, she became a more disorganized person as she became an alcoholic, but bounced back to a more "obnoxious" status after Danielle, her daughter, got pregnant and she tried to raise the baby as her own rather than admit the truth. From around Season 4 onwards, Bree loosened up and became more career-focused and slightly more open-minded, accepting her son's homosexuality and even having him run her new business.
• Off the Wagon: In Season 8, when she's being blackmailed, she relapses into alcoholism.
• The Perfectionist: She's a perfection freak, at least in the first seasons, when she couldn't even stand the sight of a loose button.
• Pillow Pregnancy: Bree uses a fake belly to convince her friends she's pregnant rather than admit that it's really her teenage daughter who's pregnant. She even passes the child off as her own for a bit, but when Edie finds out and tries to blackmail her, Bree confesses the truth to her friends, who forgive her.
• Preppy Name: She's had a variety of preppy names with her first husbands until she married Trip Weston.
• Pretty in Mink: Wore a sable coat to try to win back Rex.◊
• Proper Lady: Deconstructed since the very first episode.
• Really Gets Around: Yes, you read that right. During season 8, she relapses into alcoholism, and begins to date a lot in bars. However, what was only a brief experience became a habit, and it becomes clear that she has a different man each night in her bed. When she is confronted by an angry spouse (because she had sex with her husband) in the middle of the church during the 12th episode, she doesn't deny it. Worse: she actually acknowledges it, and is on her way to embrace this way of life.
• Sexy Coat Flashing: Does this to Rex with a fur coat in a motel with the hope of revitalizing their sex life.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Bree is unfailingly polite and friendly, but she will totally go nuts if she needs to.
• Stepford Smiler: The other housewives have traces of this, but Bree is the ultimate Stepford Smiler of the show. Her own son calls her out on it in the pilot, saying she acts like she's running for Mayor of Stepford.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: On one hand, she's one hell of a Stepford Smiler. On the other hand, she's a loving friend to the other main housewives and she does love her children despite how insanely controlling she is.
• Supreme Chef: She's really good at cooking a lot of recipes, especially old school ones from her family. Not so for Italian cuisine, that said.
• Team Mom: She and Lynette seem to share this role in the group.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In the end of Season 4 and 6. In Season 4, she was extremely hypocritical about Orson's crimes. In Season 6, the largely moral and loyal Bree had a secret affair behind Orson's back with Karl, Susan's ex-husband.
• Took a Level in Kindness: In Season 3 mostly notably and Season 2 as she recovered from her addiction, she grew to feel guilty for abandoning Andrew, developed into having a loving and healthy relationship with Orson.
• Trauma Conga Line: If something really traumatic is going to happen to one of the leading females in the cast, chances are high it will be for Bree.
• Uptight Loves Wild: She eventually falls for the sleazy, impulsive Karl when she's trapped in a loveless marriage with Orson.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Punches Alma in the face after she drugs and rapes Orson.
• White Anglo-Saxon Protestant: Although Rex's family name reveals a Dutch heritage, Bree's maiden name, "Mason", is British. As she explains to her (Jewish) marriage counselor when he questions her preference for carrying on as normal, despite obvious problems:
  "We're WASPs, Dr. Goldfine. Ignoring the elephant in the room is what we do best."

Gabrielle

Gabrielle "Gaby" Solis (formerly Lang, née Marquez)

Played by: Eva Longoria

Dubbed by: Odile Schmitt (French)

"Gabrielle was a drowning woman, desperately searching for a life raft. Luckily for her, she found one. Of course, Gabrielle only saw her young gardener as a way to infuse her life with a little excitement. But now she was about to discover just how exciting her life could get."

— Mary Alice Young

A former top model turned trophy wife, Gaby gave up her lavish life in NYC to move to the suburbs of Fairview and adjust to a quieter, more settled lifestyle with Carlos Solis. During the first three years of marriage, Carlos was always away on business trips, leaving Gaby to become bored, lonely and unhappy, resulting in her having affairs with local handsome young men. Eventually the sense of friendship and family overwhelmed her, and Gabrielle found her happiness on Wisteria Lane.

---

• Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: She began to cheat on Carlos due to him constantly leaving her alone while he went on business trips.
• Aesop Amnesia: How many times has she learned being a better person is more important than having material possessions or looking pretty?

• All Women Love Shoes: She does, even to the point where she refuses to return the shoes even though she isn't sure she can afford them.
• Ambiguously Bi: In Season 5 she didn't have an issue kissing Susan. Also in Season 3, she (drunkenly) tells Susan she would hook up with her if she was a lesbian.
• The Baby of the Bunch: Of the 3 main girls, she is the youngest and least experienced at being a housewife, with her marriage to Carlos being relatively recent, being the only one who didn't have children of her own.
• Bathing Beauty: Has a fondness for taking long bubble baths to relax and has had several Bathtub Scenes over the duration of the series.
• Beauty Is Best: A firm believer in this. It causes her a lot of angst when her daughter doesn't care about this as much as her.
• Book Dumb: Especially when it comes to geography (she thinks Argentina is near Romania).
• Boomerang Bigot: Gabrielle is accused of being a "Self-hating Mexican" at one point by Carlos, who realizes that the reason Juanita was unaware of their ethnicity was because Gabby has gone out of her way to prevent him from teaching their daughters Spanish or anything to do with their heritage.
• Brainless Beauty: Averted - along with being Book Dumb, Gaby is a former model, though she's not stupid by a longshot, she's just more cunning than traditionally intelligent.
• CatchPhrase: For the first four or five seasons or so, she manages to work the phrase "son of a bitch" in at least once per season. To be fair to her, it often refers to Carlos, who is the son of an actual bitch.
• Characterization Marches On: She is seen smoking in the pilot episode, but never smokes again for the rest of the show.
• Cheating with the Milkman: Her long-term affair with John Rowland who she met while he was working as her gardener.
• Chekhov's Skill: In the final season, her love of shopping, knowledge of fashion, and ability to put together gorgeous ensembles—all of which were established in the first season and showed up throughout the series—get her a job as a personal shopper in an upscale department store. From there, she's able to establish an online shopper business, and in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, it's revealed that her skill landed her a show on the Home Shopping Network, a mansion, and a true "happily ever after."
• Daddy's Girl: Whenever Gaby mentions her father she always speaks of him fondly and even though he died when she was only five, she clearly misses him very much.
• Deadpan Snarker: Prone to snark, just like pretty much everyone else in Wisteria Lane. And just like everyone else, it might help her to cope with the rollercoaster that is life there.
• Divorce Is Temporary: She ended up remarrying Carlos following the Victor Lang sequence.
• Domestic Abuse: She's often emotionally abusive to Carlos, although Carlos sends it back to her.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After everything she and Carlos go through—affairs, blindness, domestic abuse, natural disasters, and rehab, just to name a few—Gabby eventually lands a job as a personal shopper in Season Eight. She genuinely loves the work—the first time she can say that in her whole life—and eventually uses her talent to develop an online shopping empire, complete with a television show. It's humorously lampshaded in the final moments of the Grand Finale, which comments that Gabrielle and Carlos "argued happily ever after" in their California mansion.
• Ephebophile: Gabrielle had an on-again-off-again tryst with her gardener since he was about 17 years old. Thanks to being played by a visibly grown man, it's easy to forget he's supposed to be a teenager.
• Establishing Character Moment: An In-Universe one occurs in a flashback-heavy episode. The other housewives (including a still-alive Mary Alice) invite Gabrielle to their weekly poker game, and she spends the entire time bragging about her former life of luxury, one-upping the rest of the women, whining about how "low class" Wisteria Lane is, and generally being a royal pain. She thinks the meeting went well, but when Wisteria Lane's beloved handyman Eli Scruggs tells her the truth about the housewives' reactions, she's humbled and goes back to the women with an apology and a confession about how difficult things have been for her lately.
• The Fashionista: Even after her career as a fashion model (see below) ends, she still possesses an amazing sense of style and loves to wear—and especially shop for—luxury items. Her talent gets her a job as a personal shopper and eventually her own show on the Home Shopping Network, which she parlays into a massive success.
• Freudian Excuse: Gabrielle's lack of maternal instincts and her willingness to sleep with John can be explained by her own very difficult relationship with her mother, who reveals to Carlos she knew her husband was sleeping with Gabrielle, but makes it clear she thinks it's because Gabrielle "seduced" him - Gabrielle was fifteen years old at the time.
• Good Bad Girl: Cheats on Carlos with John, is extremely Hot-Blooded and aggressive, lies to everyone, cares only for money and material possessions...but she also has Hidden Depths and grows to genuinely love Carlos and she's also not wrong for wanting to protect herself. Plus all the housewives are chronic liars and busybodies.
• Happily Married: Although she and Carlos are a subversion in Season 1 where she's his Trophy Wife who's cheating on him behind his back. But they actually become much happier in Season 2 and 3 before their surrogacy agreement fails, and they end up happy together partway through Season 4, which lasts for good, and they become the most stable couple on Wisteria Lane.
• Head-Turning Beauty: Out of the main housewives, she often portrayed as the most attractive, with characters often commenting on her good looks. Justified since she is a former model.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Though Gaby is quite shrewd and emotionally intelligent, her only real "marketable" skills are being really good at shopping and creating stylish outfits. In the final season, she learns that there's a whole industry to be found in a luxury service where rich people pay someone to...shop and create stylish outfits (this is Truth in Television, as "personal shoppers" are a lucrative business sponsored by wealthy people who either don't have time to make purchases or lack fashion sense). Turns out those talents were all Gaby ever needed to become an incredibly wealthy and successful person.
• Hot-Blooded: She's a temperamental and passionate woman who's quick to anger on issues she really cares about.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Being only 5'2, Gaby is pretty much the Tiny Girl to every man she's involved with.
• It's All About Me: Throughout and, although she frequently learns this isn't the case, she never really shakes it, though she's not as bad as Susan.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She can be callous or insensitive, but she truly cares about her friends, her daughters, and Carlos.
• Mandatory Motherhood: Having previously been skeptical about having children (though she does get pregnant and lose the baby),she has children after the five-year time skip.
• Marriage Before Romance: Carlos seems to love her but she is (at best) neutral on him, and he treats her more like an object than a person. By Season 5, though (after a lot of ups and downs), they have the strongest marriage on Wisteria Lane, and they stay that way.
• Modeling is Glamorous: Gabrielle Solis was a former New York City supermodel who hung with the likes of Heidi Klum. It was through this career that she met and married her wealthy husband Carlos. This high-flying past life in NYC is contrasted with her poor upbringing and the current travails of upper-class suburbia.
• Mr. Vice Guy: Openly vain, materialistic and immature but a loyal friend and (eventually) loving wife and mother.
• Ms. Fanservice: She is a former supermodel and often wears fancy and revealing outfits, usually with an emphasis on her legs. She also often has workout scenes in skimpy clothes and often seen bathing.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Gaby turns shopping into high art. In Season Eight, she gets an entire department store following her around as she assembles outfits; when she puts together an ensemble for a romper that not even the toughest employee could figure out, everyone in the place starts applauding.
• Never a Self-Made Woman:
  • See Proud Beauty for exactly how, but first with Carlos, then with Victor. Gaby is very proud of having married for money and is open about her own shortcomings, but she does view it as work.
  • Subverted in the final season, when she starts working as a personal shopper (someone who assists wealthy customers in choosing items) in an upscale department store. It's clear that this is all Gaby—Carlos has nothing to do with her genuine talent and even pulls a mild Stay in the Kitchen on her. But Gaby refuses to give it up, as she sincerely loves the work, so Carlos agrees to help her establish her own online shopper company. From there, she becomes the family's main breadwinner, eventually securing a TV show on the Home Shopping Network, a fancy mansion, and enormous wealth.
• Not Wanting Kids Is Weird: For someone who started off refusing to ever have kids, almost all of her long storylines revolve around having them, whether her miscarriage, her surrogacy, or ultimately having kids after the Season 5 time skip.
• Pink Means Feminine: She wears a lot of pink outfits, especially in the early seasons. After becoming a mother she begins wearing red more frequently instead, signifying her maturity.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Gaby is tiny, but she's sure capable of some impressive feats of strength - she's able to push the much bigger Carlos out of the window, throw another man out of her house on her own, push a sofa piled high with her stuff down the street to hide it in a garage, knocks Victor off his boat by hitting him with an oar twice and can hold her own in a Cat Fight with women far taller than her.
• Proud Beauty: Gaby made her money modeling and she's aware of just how beautiful she is.
• Quitting to Get Married: Gabrielle quits her career as an international fashion model to marry Carlos. It proves to have been the right decision since in Season 7 it is revealed that her career would have ended soon anyway, due to her bad attitude.
• Rags to Riches:
  • She was born into a poor Mexican-American family then embraced a model career and married Carlos.
  • Once Carlos sees again, he starts working in lucrative businesses again and their wealth improves once more.
  • When Carlos leaves rehab, he starts giving away vast sums, which threatens to bankrupt the family. However, Gaby eventually turns a stint as a personal shopper in a fancy department store into a full-blown career, complete with an Internet business and television show, securing the Solises' wealth permanently.
• Rape as Backstory: She was regularly raped by her stepfather, who comes back right at the end of Season 7.
• Rich Bitch: Her "bitch" status depends on the writer.
• Riches to Rags: Following Carlos' imprisonment and loss of sight.
• Self-Serving Memory: She recalls her time as a model as being wonderful, much loved and she hated giving it up to marry Carlos. During a trip to New York, Gabby is thrown that some former model "friends" rip into her about how much they hated her. Her former agent then breaks it down that Gaby was an incredible diva whose demands were getting so bad that agencies were deciding not to use her because of the hassle. Gaby realizes that instead of "ruining" her career, marrying Carlos saved her from getting kicked out of the business.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: As a former model, she isn't much for modesty and once even began to act as a Home Nudist, purely to spite Carlos. She comes to regret this when a nude yoga session causes her gardener to have an accident.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Her main dynamic with Carlos and most of the boyfriends she has.
• Slut-Shaming: Gaby tends to be both on the receiving and giving end of this trope, as other women often accuse her of flirting with their husbands (one particularly harsh example involves Gaby's own mother), but Gaby has also done the same thing with Edie several times.
• Smarter Than You Look: Gaby lampshades that people (especially men) tend to think of her as a shallow ditz, but while she's not booksmart at all, she's a very good judge of other people and knows what makes them tick.
• Spicy Latina: A subversion, believe it or not. Yes Gaby is sexy and she certainly has the temper but she lacks the sterotypical accent, can't speak Spanish and as several episodes have shown is indifferent at best towards her Hispanic heritage.
• Spoiled Brat: When it comes to material possessions.
• Stage Mom:
  • A downplayed example in that Gaby often tries to encourage Juanita to pursue extracurricular activities, often when Juanita doesn't want to, though in fairness Gaby means well and she does have some well-founded concerns about how if she let Juanita do whatever she wanted she wouldn't do anything but watch TV and eat more junk food.
  • In one Bad Future episode, Gaby imagines becoming an extreme example of this with Celia, pushing her to become a famous actress and being oblivious to Celia's discomfort with it and only doing so to make Gaby happy.
• Stepford Snarker: In addition to Gaby's troubled marriage, she and Carlos like to snark at each other. She becomes a nicer, more positive, version after she has her daughters.
• Token Minority: Among the housewives, until Renee's appearance in Season 7, she's the only non-white main housewife.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Although she can still be pretty cutting, she takes several in these between Season 1 and 2, and then again between Season 4 and 5.
• Trophy Wife: Was this to Carlos at first, as a model who married a rich CEO after their third date. But their relationship eventually evolved and they become a Happily Married couple in later seasons.
• Volleying Insults: She and Carlos do this a lot, and were at their most tempestuous in the early seasons.
• What the Hell, Hero?: When the family unexpectedly run into John in Season Five and he starts flirting with Ana, Gaby is incensed and Carlos suspects she still has feelings for John. Gaby retorts she was angry because John was flirting with her sixteen-year-old niece and considering she stuck with Carlos while he was blind for six years and did everything she could to make ends meet, he has no right to "test" her loyalty to him and if he thinks he still needs to, he's the one who isn't being loyal. Carlos realizes she's right and apologizes.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Gaby is very uncomfortable in hospitals. When she visits Lynette during her chemo, she explains this is because her father also died of cancer and Gaby sat by his beside while he died, smiling the entire time because her mother told her her father wouldn't want to see her looking sad.
• Woman Of Wealth And Taste: She's the most glamorous of the housewives and often seen dressed up in fancy clothing, enjoying expensive drinks and foods or overall enjoying a lavish lifestyle.

Other prominent housewives

Mary Alice

Mary Alice Young (real name Angela Forrest)

Played by: Brenda Strong

Dubbed by: Françoise Cadol (French)

"There was a time when my husband and I were very happy. I remember warm summer afternoons. And backyard barbecues. And laughter with friends. Our life was like some kind of suburban dream. But the day comes when we all must wake up..."

A friendly but mysterious housewife from Wisteria Lane. The series was kicked off when she committed suicide, and she narrated it ever since, seemingly observing everyone from the afterlife.

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• The Ace: Beloved by all her friends, extremely kind and nurturing, a wonderful mother. And a kidnapper and murderer.
• The Artifact: By the end of season 2, all of her storylines had been wrapped up pretty much, and there really was no particular point to her character anymore other than simply being the narrator (of mysteries unrelated to her). Even when Paul comes back in season 7, her character is hardly referred to and she makes little-if any attempt in her narration to remind us that Paul was her husband.
• Back for the Finale: She's the last ghost to be seen in Wisteria Lane as Susan drives away from it in the final episode.
• Beware the Nice Ones: She was the matriarch of her neighborhood, that could lend a friendly ear and shoulder to cry on for anyone who needed it. Her friendly, wise, kind nature was genuine, which remains even in death as she watches over her friends, quite possibly loving them even more now that she can see the secrets they were keeping. She also purchased her son from a drug addicted mother named Deidre, and murdered said mother when she cleaned herself up and came back for her child.
• Blackmail: She was victim of this, and it sadly led to her death.
• Dark Secret: She killed Deirdre Taylor, the former drug addict who was the biological mother of Dana (Zach), and permanently changed of identity and residential location because of this.
• Driven to Suicide: She was blackmailed and committed suicide, which set off the entire storyline of the first season and part of the second, as well as leftovers with Paul Young's story arc in Season 7.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Despite knowing it was illegal she bought the infant son of an addict, knowing she would probably sell it to anyone and most likely thought it was the best option since she herself wanted a child so badly. When people started looking for the baby however, she packed up and left with him and her husband. When the addict came back years later to demand they give her her son back, Mary refused because she had raised him and got so scared of the thought of being parted from her child that she killed the mother.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: She has golden blonde hair in keeping with her good, ghostly portrayal.
• Heroic Suicide: Although she is an Anti-Hero (she did murder and chop up Zach's mother's body), she committed suicide so Martha wouldn't reveal her secret and ruin Paul and Zach's lives.
• The Kindnapper: She was a genuinely good mother and Living Emotional Crutch to Zach, despite having kidnapped him from his real mother.
• Knight Templar Parent: To Zach. She kills Deirdre rather than let her take Zach back.
• Mama Bear: She and Zach had a very close relationship and it was her who could rein him in.
  • She calls Barbara out for her Parental Neglect of Eddie and tries to be a mother figure to him, but Barbara doesn't listen to her.
• More Deadly Than the Male: The main twist of Season 1's mystery is that Paul - despite being a murderer and manipulator in other circumstances - didn't kill Deirdre. Mary-Alice did, and it was her idea to chop Deirdre's body into pieces.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Her face says it all after she learns Deirdre hasn't been using.
• Near-Death Clairvoyance: Exactly what her voiceovers comprise of after her suicide in the opening minutes.
• Plot-Triggering Death: The series was kicked off by her death.
• Posthumous Character: Her death impacts the whole first and second seasons, she narrates from the other world in most episodes of the series, and the Felicia Tilman-Paul Young enmity towards the end of the series also has roots in what she did and her death.
• Posthumous Narration: She narrates the series after her death.
• Same Character, But Different: Despite the fact that the housewives learned she was a murderer, whenever Mary-Alice reappears, she tends to remain exactly like her Too Good for This Sinful Earth persona.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Despite her Proper Lady pretense, Mary-Alice is prepared to kill other people (and herself) to hide the truth about what she did.
• Stepford Smiler: She was very affable and befriended the main housewives of Wisteria Lane, but the weight of her Dark Secret was still there.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Her arc is an ultimate subversion of this in Season 1, as she turns out to be a kidnapper and murderer. However, it's completely forgotten about in later seasons, and her appearances in Season 6, for instance, suggest that she is a moral authority over Abusive Parents, for instance.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Beloved by all of Wisteria Lane, but also a determined kidnapper who brutally killed her kidnapped-adopted son's mother.

Edie

Edie Williams (formerly McLain and Roswell, née Britt)

Played by: Nicollette Sheridan

Dubbed by: Marie-Martine Bisson (French)

"Edie Britt was the most predatory divorcée within a five-block radius. Her conquests were numerous, varied and legendary."

— Mary Alice Young

A real estate agent whose poor childhood led to an adulthood of promiscuous behavior, seducing any man she likes. Despite this, she somehow married twice.

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• Anti-Villain: A lot of her behavior isn't that much worse than the other housewives, but because she's often used as a Romantic False Lead for Love Triangle purposes, she is portrayed as a villain. (Some of the time. Some of her behavior is awful.)
• Ascended Extra: After the first season, she was given a much more prominent role.
• Attention Whore: She loves attention and will do anything to get it, especially from men but also from anybody.
• Be a Whore to Get Your Man: She is a firm believer in this and often advises the other housewives to be more sexually aggressive in their pursuits.
• The Baby Trap: Inverted. She convinces Carlos to stay with her by promising she'd have a baby with him but continued to secretly take birth control. He promptly breaks up with her when he finds out.
• Break the Haughty: Season 5 is this in spades for her.
• Brutal Honesty: She never embellishes the truth when voicing her opinion to other people of Wisteria Lane, often bordering on Accentuate the Negative.
• Cheated Death, Died Anyway: She escaped from Dave as he was strangling her, only to crash her car, get electrocuted, and die.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: When she fears Carlos will leave her.
• Cool Big Sis: While she may hate Susan, she's shown nothing but fondness towards Julie. Even after she and Karl breakup, she continues to prove to have a soft spot for her near step-daughter.
  Edie: (regarding Austin) Julie, sweetie, you're a good girl. Do yourself a favor and stay away from my nephew.
  Julie: Oh trust me, I have no interest in muscle bound juvenile delinquents.
  Edie: (affectionately stroking her hair) Honey. That's what every good girl says before she becomes a bad girl. Trust me. I should know.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: After her death in Season 5, all four lead women and Karen McCluskey visit her Son Travers to inform him of her death and to give him her ashes. When Travers appears unfazed by this, he says his mother didn't try to raise him, just handed him to his father and walked away. Angry, Karen tells Travers about how some years back, Edie comforted Karen on the anniversary of her son's death and told her that she wanted Travers to be brought up properly and she knew she wouldn't have been a good mother to him. Either way, she still loved him.
• Daddy Issues: She eventually admits her father walked out on her and her mother when she was young and gave all Edie's prized dolls to his new wife's daughter because Edie was too old for them.
• Deadpan Snarker: It's an understatement to say she has a razor-sharp tongue.
  "Well, someone's gotta say it - Susan, what the hell have you been smoking?"
• Everyone Loves Blondes: The biggest Ms. Fanservice and Dude Magnet in the show, who just so happens to be a blonde.
• Expy: She is based on the character of Joyce (Kathy Baker) from Edward Scissorhands, another slutty neighbor who serves as a Romantic False Lead.
• Faking the Dead: She tries faking her own suicide so she can manipulate Carlos into staying in their relationship. Unfortunately, she almost kills herself by accident.
• Fatal Attractor: Her only husband shown onscreen is a murderer who is just using her, and she is obsessed with Carlos and Mike who both want Gaby and Susan respectively. Subverted with the father of her son, who seems like a normal man and says it's Edie that didn't want to settle down and be a mother.
• Femme Fatale: Somewhat of an Informed Attribute, but Edie apparently Really Gets Around.
• Foster Kid: Due to her father walking out and her mother being in jail, she spent a lot of her childhood being raised by social workers.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Even when she's on good terms with the other housewives, it's clear none of them truly likes her.
• Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak: She's a very traditionally attractive and vain woman who nevertheless loves most "masculine" activities.
• A Good Way to Die: Played for Black Comedy as Edie's last thoughts as she's dying on the street with all her neighbors surrounding her is of being content that she was at the center of attention again.
  Edie: I died just like I lived — as the complete and utter center of attention.
• Guest Host: She gets to narrate an episode, which focuses on the immediate aftermath of her death and memories Susan, Lynette, Bree and Gaby had of her.
• Hidden Depths: She started as a shallow and sluttish Romantic False Lead to Mike and Susan's rival, but as the show went on the writers started to humanize her more and give her character depth.
• High-Voltage Death: She is killed when she accidentally catches some damaged power cables with the door of her car, which she had crashed into a electricty pole, while trying to get out of her car.
• Hypocrite: She loves messing with people through Brutal Honesty, but she's in denial about her own troubles.
  • She also has no problem admitting to sleeping with Karl while he was still married to Susan but absolutely hates Susan when she sleeps with Karl while he's with Edie even though Susan thought he was single because Karl lied to her and told her that he and Edie had broken up.
• I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: Knows how to use them to get her own way.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: While she had many casual and meaningless relationships, she secretly yearns for someone who will truly care for her, which she never truly found.
• Interrupted Suicide: Edie tries to set up a fake suicide as a plot for attention, waiting until right as Carlos got back to the house to hang herself so that he'd be able to save her. Then the "Just in Time" arrival gets interrupted, and she has to scramble to get herself to safety, narrowly averting an Accidental Suicide.
• It's All About Me: Edie is notorious for her extremely self-centered attitude.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Edie very frequently points out the ridiculous or selfish behavior of the other Housewives, especially her Sitcom Arch-Nemesis, Susan.
  • She calls Susan out on her selfishness when she lies to Mike about trying to find Zach when in fact she paid him off to go to Utah so he'd stop causing problems for her and Julie but pretends to be helping out with the search for him anyway.
  • When Karen's house is hit by a hurricane and Lynette's family is inside, Edie tells the other housewives they have to stop assuring Lynette they'll all be fine because they can't promise that and Lynette has to be prepared to face the worst.
  • She points out to Gaby after Carlos is blinded that she can't keep up the Slap-Slap-Kiss they had before now that Carlos has a disability, even if Carlos pretends he can still handle it.
  • She calls Susan out on her dating life, pointing out that Susan has never been single for long and thus never learned to stand up on her own and appreciate her own company, instead just jumping from relationship to relationship because she doesn't want to be alone. Susan even agrees with her.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She's an absolute jerk, but she does have a fair share of moments that humanize her.
• Killed Off for Real: She dies by a combination of a car accident and electrocution in season 5.
• The Lad-ette: She drinks beer, hates all that lovey-dovey stuff, and just wants some no-strings sex.
• Love Makes You Crazy: In season 4 Edie is unusually vicious about keeping Carlos in her hands, attempting suicide, even when she was certain he'd rescue her in time is kind of a big leap for her.
• Lower-Class Lout: Implied. She is wealthier now, but she is from an impoverished background and she has a bad attitude.
• Manipulative Bitch: Particularly when it comes to relationships. Among other things, she lied to an amnesiac Mike about his relationship with Susan, offered to have a baby with Carlos while still taking birth control, and, when he found out, faked a suicide attempt in order to get him to stay with her.
• Maternally Challenged: She's a very distant mother to her son, something Carlos repeatedly calls her out on.
• Ms. Fanservice: Out of all the women in the series, she has the most scenes in underwear, swimwear, corsets or other revealing clothes. She's also known for her proud promiscuity and prowess in bed.
  • Entered somewhat controversial territory, as a parody intro for Monday Night Football, had Nicollette Sheridan in character as Edie, seducing Terrell Owens before a game, exiting the shower and dropping her towel exposing her naked back.
• My Girl Is Not a Slut: Her shameless promiscuity is presented as a negative thing to make the viewers and other characters dislike her.
  Mary Alice: Susan had met the enemy and she was a slut.
• Nephewism: Her nephew Austin ran away from home in season 3, due to issues with his mother's new boyfriend. Since he sees Edie as a Cool Aunt, he travels to her house seeking shelter and she takes him under her wing for the rest of the season.
• One of the Boys: She used to hang around boys when she was young and has trouble making friends with women even as an adult. She also noticeably has quite a few hobbies and habits associated with men, such as a love for sports, beer, and casual sex.
• Only Friend: Martha Huber was her only and Best Friend in Wisteria Lane, both being Black Sheep amongst the housewives in the neighborhood. Edie is actually devasted when Martha dies in season 1.
• Proud Beauty: Edie is a Head-Turning Beauty who's obsessed and proud of her appearance.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: To Carlos in Season 4, to the point of going to increasingly desperate lengths to ensnare him, even committing suicide to make him rescue her.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Nicolette Sheridan's disputes with Marc Cherry led to her leaving the show and Edie being killed off near the end of season 5.
• Really Gets Around: She's extremely promiscuous, and she loves it. As Mary Alice puts it: "[Edie's] conquests were numerous, varied, and legendary."
• The Rival: She is this for both Carlos's love (in Season 4) and Mike's (in Season 1), so she becomes this by default to Gaby and Susan respectively.
• Serial Homewrecker: Edie is mentioned to have slept with lots of married men. However, late in Season 1 when Mike chooses Susan over her, she seems to actively prefer married men and men that specifically had been married to the housewives: in Season 2, she had an affair with Susan's ex Karl (now married to someone else), and she "steals" Gaby's husband Carlos, although the two are separated, in Season 3 which continues in Season 4; she even kisses Orson in Season 4. Lynette describes this as Edie's problem at the end of Season 4.
• Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains: She is informed to be the "skimpy villain" to the heroic housewives' "sensible heroes", though this is somewhat informed, especially in comparison to Gaby.
• Sex Goddess: She's described as a "violently passionate" and satisfying lover, by both herself and the narrative. Ironically, her first time sleeping with Carlos ends up being amazingly bad and she's outraged when she learns he thinks it's her fault and proves him wrong the next time they end up in bed.
  Edie: [after being asked by her son why she's called "good in bed"] Nobody makes a bed as good as your mommy.
• Shady Real Estate Agent: The bitchy, unscrupulous Edie is a realtor, although the most we see her doing related to her job is her brusque way of describing Mary-Alice's suicide when she's trying to sell the Youngs' house.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: To Susan for the first three seasons, though she temporarily switches to Gaby when she starts dating Carlos.
• Sixth Ranger: She was featured alongside the four main housewives in promo material from season 2 to season 5, reflecting her Ascended Extra status.
• Smarter Than You Look: Edie appears to be the standard Dumb Blonde but is definitely not, although she'll often pretend to be dumber to get men interested in her.
• Stripperific: Her outfits tend to be very revealing.
• Take a Moment to Catch Your Death: In a rare overlap with Cheated Death, Died Anyway, once Edie survives being choked by Dave, she gets in a car accident and is electrocuted but she's still alive for a minute. Then Susan comes over to comfort her and she dies.
  Susan: You're going to be okay, Edie.
  Edie: [voice over] Susan Mayer, wrong again.
• Temporary Love Interest: Three times! First, she was competing with Susan to get Mike, then when Susan got together with him she started dating Carlos after he divorced Gaby. Then after Carlos and Gaby get back together and Edie is chased out of the neighborhood for sleeping with Mike, Karl, Carlos, and Orson, she comes back married to Dave, who was still in love with his deceased wife and just used Edie as an excuse to move back to Fairview for his revenge plot against Mike and Susan.
• The Vamp: In the Stripperific way she dresses and in her sexually aggressive attitude. She seduces and uses any man she comes across, and she doesn't care if they're married either. Special mention goes to Mike, Carlos, and Karl.

Katherine Mayfair

Katherine Irma Mayfair (formerly Davis, née Simms)

Played by: Dana Delany

Dubbed by: Marine Jolivet (French)

A former victim of domestic abuse, perpetrated by her first husband Wayne Davis, Katherine moved to Wisteria Lane with her aunt Mrs. Simms, hoping to get away from her rough lifestyle and be happy. However, unfortunate circumstances led her to pack up in 1995, and leave suddenly, only to return 12 years later, in 2007, with a new family in tow and a big secret weighing heavily on her. Katherine rivaled Bree Van de Kamp for the title of perfect home fairy, and soon moved comfortably into the position of scheming vixen when it came to going about making her ends meet.

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• The Artifact: In season six, the writers didn't really know what to do with her after Mike marries Susan. So she ends up going through various hysterics that were almost completely irrelevant to the rest of the season's plot, before finding out she's a lesbian and leaving for Paris with Robin Gallagher.
• Back for the Finale
• Cat Fight: She has one with Susan over Mike in early season 6.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Let's just say she didn't take losing Mike to Susan between season 5 and 6 very well. So much so that she becomes literally crazy and ends up interned in a psychiatric hospital.
• Depraved Bisexual: Caused by her Season 5 and Season 6 arcs being back to back. Katherine is Mike's psycho ex...which she only gets over when she falls in Love at First Sight with Robin.
• The Dog Bites Back: When her abusive husband came to take their daughter from her, Katherine finally decided to let him know that she wasn't having anymore of him and struck him with a candlestick.
• Evil Counterpart: To Bree in Season 4 (and arguably in 5-6). Like Bree, she is a serious Stepford Smiler and brilliant chef. She also behaves in a very controlling manner towards Dylan, which borders on emotional abuse at times and she even slaps Dylan for talking back to her.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: She ended up antagonizing the four main housewives for various reasons in season 5 and early season 6, especially Bree and Susan. Then subverted when they all end up coming together at the psychiatric hospital where she's interred to reconciliate with her.
• Gaslighting: She engages in this behavior a lot with Dylan, constantly lying to and manipulating her daughter to stop her from asking questions about her biological father.
• Lipstick Lesbian; Lipstick bisexual in this case. She and her girlfriend Robin are very feminine.

• No Bisexuals: After she is attracted to Robin, she is referred to constantly as a "lesbian" despite only having relationships with men before that. Katherine also has never shown any inclination of being bisexual until Robyn appears, which leads to the unfortunate implications of the Psycho Lesbian around her.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: Becomes one of these to Mike after he breaks off their engagement.
• Put on a Bus: In the middle of Season 6.
• Remember the New Guy?: Sorta. She moved into Wisteria Lane in the Season 4 premiere, and it turns out she lived there some time before the show started, and was Susan's best friend. And yet, she was never mentioned in the three years prior to Season 4, not in Mary Alice's narration or by Susan. Justified in that she apparently moved away before the rest of the housewives even arrived, so there wouldn't be any need for Susan to mention her.
• The Rival: To Susan in season 5 and season 6, because of Mike Delfino. To Bree in Season 4 to see who can be the most domestic.
• Same Character, But Different: Several times. She appears much more sadistic in Season 4, before after midseason, being presented much more kindly and sympathetically, before the finale turns her into a full blown Sympathetic Murderer. In Season 5, she is the Temporary Love Interest getting between Mike and Susan, then in Season 6, she is a Hysterical Woman and Psycho Ex-Girlfriend for Mike.
• Stepford Smiler: In Season 4, where she appears to be Bree's Evil Counterpart, until she becomes a Hysterical Woman in Season 5.
• Sympathetic Murderer: She is forced to kill her first husband Wayne due to his being a Dirty Cop with friends who will either get him off or make sure he gets very little jail time so he can return to kill her.
• Temporary Love Interest: It's pretty clear her relationship in Season 5 with Mike isn't going to last.
• Villain Decay: Went from being a terrifying and unpredictable villain in Season 4, even leaving her aunt to die, over the death of her daughter, for which she was blameless to just being a straight up annoyance after Mike leaves her for Susan.
• Villainy Discretion Shot: Was gratuitously cruel to her dying aunt and treated her daughter poorly before her secret was revealed and she joined the core group.
• Yandere: In season 6, towards Mike.
  • She's practically a poster child. She got increasingly insane in the first half of the season, but then regained sanity later. Turned out she's much more sane in a lesbian relationship.

Renee

Renee Faulkner (formerly Perry)

Played by: Vanessa Williams

Dubbed by: Isabelle Leprince (French)

"Renee comes off a little stuck-up when your first meet her, which is a real time-saver."

— Lynette Scavo

Appearing in season 7, Renee is a narcissistic diva from Manhattan, a glamorous party girl who became disenchanted with her humdrum lifestyle and decided to move to Wisteria Lane, close to her sorority sister from college, Lynette Scavo. She initially ruffles the other housewives' feathers with her aggressive behavior but eventually develops close friendships with her neighbors.

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• Bridezilla: She marries Ben Faulkner in the show's final episode, and in the lead-up to this, she yells at everyone and is very bitchy on the way to the wedding. Then, if this wasn't enough, as Susan, Gaby and Julie are taking her to the wedding, Julie's water breaks in the limo and ruins Renee's dress and shoes, infuriating her even more. They solve the mess by making a pit stop at Gabrielle's department store for a new dress, and Susan and Julie take off with the limo to go to the hospital. Gaby and Renee then steal a dress and shoes and run to the ceremony.
• 11th-Hour Ranger: She appeared in the two final seasons, and more or less joined the four main housewives in prominence by season 8.
• Funny Afro: During Tom and Lynette Scavo's separation, she introduces her hairdresser Frank to Lynette and the two have a date. Said date ends up a disaster because Lynette spent her time advising a business plan to Frank. The next day, Frank takes revenge on Renee's hair, leaving her with a huge Foxy Brown-like perm.
• Happily Ever After: The last time she is seen in the series' finale, she marries Ben Faulkner.

• Old Flame: She had a one night stand with Tom Scavo twenty years before her arrival in Wisteria Lane, and fondly remembers it to the point of considering him as the love of her life.
• Remember the New Guy?: She was an important friend to Lynette, and Bree mentions that Lynette talked quite a lot about her. To the viewer, she was unheard of until season 7.
• Rich Bitch: She's much snarkier and meaner than the other housewives by Season 7.
• The Rival: To Bree in early season 7, because of Keith Watson.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: For Edie (who was dead) and for early-season Gaby.
  • Like Gaby, she was a more materialistic, extremely wealthy, glamorous woman of color who was also not too "black."
  • Like Edie, she was a promiscuous Deadpan Snarker (or was supposed to be, anyway) who would say what other people feared and Tom cheated on her with Lynette from back in the day.
• Sixth Ranger / Replacement Goldfish: A clear example of becoming one out of universe to Edie.

Karen McCluskey

Karen McCluskey (née Simonds)

Played by: Kathryn Joosten

Dubbed by: Paule Emanuele and Nicole Favart (French)

A local babysitter who loves to cause trouble. Originally introduced as a nemesis to Lynette Scavo, Karen progressively became a friend to the main housewives and Edie.

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• Big Damn Heroes: As she's dying of cancer at the Solises' home in season 8, she hears the truth about what Carlos did, and she steps in during Bree's trial, claiming SHE killed Alejandro Perez, turning the tables and saving the day. Doubles as Heroic Sacrifice.
• Cassandra Truth: She feels something is really fishy with Dave Williams in season 5, and figures out he moved objects in her house to have her hospitalized as a Scatterbrained Senior to free himself from a nuisance. And nobody believes her, specially after she tried attacking Dave with a baseball bat as soon as she saw him in the middle of a surprise birthday party that was organized for her.
• Character Death: She dies of cancer in the series' finale. She's the last character to die in the series.
• Cool Old Lady: After all, she was portrayed by Kathryn Joosten.
• Deadpan Snarker: Like most people in Wisteria Lane, she's prone to sarcasms. And she might well be the champion on the lane at that.
  Karen: (to Lynette) No offense, but you should be sterilized.
• December–December Romance: She develops a romance with Roy Bender (who's over 80 year old) in season 6, and they eventually marry.
• Hero of Another Story: Very little about her backstory is revealed, but both her husband's corpse in the freezer and her son who died when he was very young are only episode plots.
• Little Old Lady Investigates: In Season 5, when she feels something is off about Dave.
• Loners Are Freaks: Subverted.
• Nosy Neighbor: Sometimes, when she feels something is wrong with a neighbor's apparent Nice Guy demeanor and sees it as Faux Affably Evil, she takes upon herself to investigate. She gets help from her sister Roberta in season 5 against Dave Williams.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Subverted. Dave tries to make her look like one in Season 5, but she's sharper than she's ever been.
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: Though especially with Lynette and her family, Karen will usually tell the Wisteria Lane residents what everyone else is afraid to.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Especially in early seasons, Karen can be very abrasive, especially to Lynette and her sons. This actually comes from a deep grief over her own young son, who reminds her of them. Plus her husband died and she put him in a freezer.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Lynette. Despite telling her she "should be sterilized", she is still a babysitter for Lynette's multiple (very noisy) kids.
• You Remind Me of X: This seems to be the root of her love-hate relationship with the Scavo kids, as they remind her of her own son, who died when he was eight.

Ida Greenberg

Ida Greenberg

Played by: Pat Crawford Brown

The elder of Wisteria Lane and a close friend to Karen McCluskey.

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• The Ace: She was a star baseball player in the woman's league during WWII.
• Dropped a Bridge on Her: She's killed during the storm that devastates Wisteria Lane at the end of season 4.
• Heroic Sacrifice: During the tornado, after Tom passed out due to his asthma attack, when the house started to shake, she made sure the Scavo children got safely under the staircase. Knowing there wasn't enough space for all of them, she chose to sit in the corner promising the kids she would be okay, but also knowing most likely she would be crushed to death when the house collapsed in on itself.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: She has a cat named Toby, and she's portrayed rather sympathetically.
• Lady Drunk: She has a drinking problem, and she prays God so she can stop. It's solved hilariously when her bottle is shot due to an event taking place at Mike's home. Then she gets back to drinking in season 4.
• Troubled Sympathetic Bigot: When a neighborhood meeting is done for elections of the street president, Ida objects against Bob Hunter and Lee McDermott, not because of their ugly and noisy fountain, but because they're gay.

Betty Applewhite

Betty Applewhite

Played by: Alfre Woodard

Dubbed by: Maïk Darah (French)

A single mother with strong religious beliefs and not to be trifled with, Betty is a former concert pianist who will do anything to protect her family. She moves to Wisteria Lane with her two sons at the end of season 1 and becomes a prominent protagonist of season 2.

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• Acceptable Feminine Goals and Traits: She's a brilliant pianist, an excellent chef, and a great seamstress.
• Churchgoing Villain: She is a firm believer who keeps her son chained up in the basement. But she had a good reason - or so she thought.
• Dark Secret: She keeps her mentally challenged son Caleb in the basement since he's suspected of killing Melanie Foster in a fit or rage.
• Easily Forgiven: Very few people suggest that it might not have a good idea to keep her mentally challenged son locked in a basement for months, although she did have sympathetic motives.
• Evil Counterpart: To Bree, although the evil part fades as we find out she has some very good reasons for her behavior. She's a Proper Lady who loves domestic things and fine arts, and is also very protective of her two sons.
• Ironic Name: Betty "Applewhite" is a black woman, and her moral compass is a little askew although she eventually turns out to be sympathetic.
• Knight Templar Parent: All over the place, beginning when she keeps Caleb in the basement.
• Loners Are Freaks: The only real indication the other housewives get at first that she's not right is that she doesn't want to socialize with them. This is enough to make them massively suspicious.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: If she'd actually believed Caleb when he said he didn't kill Melanie, she wouldn't have come this close to killing him and holding him prisoner in the basement. But at least it wasn't too broken.
• Offing the Offspring: Subverted. She is about to do this in Season 2 to Caleb, but realizes at the last minute that he didn't kill Melanie and she is worried about the wrong son.
• Proper Lady: She loves piano and cooking, and is invariably polite.
• Put on a Bus
• Silk Hiding Steel: A villainous variation at first, she is a Proper Lady...and very scary when she wants to be.
• Stepford Smiler: She has a good reputation and a strong Churchgoing Villain streak.
• The Stoic: Betty is extremely tight-lipped and goes to great pains to never reveal how she truly feels about anything.
• Scary Black Woman: Although a justified version, she's utterly terrifying when she wants to be.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: She kept her mentally-challenged son locked in the basement, but only because he'd been framed by his older brother for murder, and she believed he would go to be prison and be treated horrifically and misunderstood by the justice system.

Angie Bolen

Angela "Angie" Bolen (née de Luca)

Played by: Drea de Matteo

Dubbed by: Marjorie Frantz (French)

A smart, brassy and liberal Italian-American woman, she is willing to go to great lengths to protect her family and to fight for what she believes in. Angie, her husband Nick and their teenage son Danny, moved to Wisteria Lane in season 6, hoping to adapt to suburban life whilst hiding a dark secret from their past.

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• Eco-Terrorist: This is her past.
• Dark Action Girl: In the past, as an environmentalist.
• Dark Secret: She had a Mad Bomber for a boyfriend and people died, and fled with the son she had with him.
• Demolitions Expert: She became an expert bomb maker using her knowledge from university, and made bombs for Patrick Logan to use.
• Granola Girl: She used to be one, although some of it comes back such as when she obsesses over waste sorting in Wisteria Lane.
• High-Heel–Face Turn: Patrick is the Big Bad of Season 6, while she left when she got pregnant with their son, although she was never as invested as him.
• Italians Talk with Hands: She's Italian-American from her mother's side, and she gesticulates more than the other housewives, though not on a caricatural level.
• Mama Bear: She will do anything to protect her family, especially her son.
• Only Sane Woman: She's very no-nonsense and perhaps the sanest housewife in all Wisteria Lane in season 6.
• Put on a Bus: Literally, at the end of season 6.
• Rambunctious Italian: Played with. She's extremely close to her son, no-nonsense, and loud and brusque, but she tries not to be so as not to draw attention to them.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: She suggests to Susan that Katherine might have been the one who strangled Julie, because it was dark and she mistook Julie for Susan. That's exactly what happened, it's just that she got the strangler wrong.
• Scars Are Forever: She has a wide scar on her back, and she's very careful not to show it.
• Supreme Chef: She's a great specialist in Italian cuisine.

Beth Young

Elizabeth "Beth" Young (née Tilman)

Played by: Emily Bergl

Paul Young's second wife. It turns out she's Felicia Tilman's daughter.

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• Born in the Wrong Century: Implied by her dress sense, mousy attitude, and domestic pursuits.
• Broken Bird: There are few fates as sad as hers in the series, to put it plainly.
• Driven to Suicide: The fact that she didn't manage to befriend anyone in Wisteria Lane plus the double whammy of her mother and Paul rejecting her drive her to shoot herself in the head at the hospital. She does so after vowing to donate her organs so Susan can have a new kidney.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: She falls in love with Paul and reveals that her extremely sweet attitude is not a pretense, and has light blonde hair.
• Heroic Suicide: Her suicide allows her to give Susan her kidney.
• Honey Trap: Her marriage to Paul is one big trap set up by her mother.
• May–December Romance: She's a lot younger than Paul.
• Momma's Boy: Sorta gender-flipped. She does everything her mother says without discussing, initially. Until she warms up to Paul.
• Ms. Fanservice: She dons some hot lingerie and waits for Paul on the bed in episode 7 of season 7, although the discomfort of the scene may make it Fan Disservice.
• The Pollyanna: Which appears to be a façade until she genuinely falls in love with Paul and makes it clear she wants her marriage to work.
• Protect This House: She threatened Susan with a revolver as she was attacking Paul after his blackmailing.
• Remember the New Guy?: There was no indication that Felicia had a daughter before.
• Romantic Fake–Real Turn: She starts to really love Paul over time, which enrages her mother.
• Second Love: She's the second wife of Paul.
• Stepford Smiler: Beth is a Perpetual Smiler despite the fact that most people can tell something is off about her.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Played with. While Beth has many Dark Secrets (notably, her parentage), when she genuinely falls in love with Paul, she reveals herself to be too sweet for anyone, and even kills herself in a variation of a Heroic Sacrifice, shooting herself at the hospital so Susan can get a kidney.
• Unexpected Virgin: She admitted being a virgin when Paul and her went to a sexologist because of her asexuality.

Less prominent housewives

Maisy Gibbons

Maisy Gibbons

Played by: Sharon Lawrence

Dubbed by: Céline Monsarrat (European French)

The neighborhood alpha mom in season 1. A bully who treated her fellow school moms like corporate minions, her real profession is turning tricks in her bedroom to help support her family.

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• Alpha Bitch: Among the mothers at Barcliffe School.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: She appears to be a respectable PTA mother but she bullies other moms and is openly judgmental.
• Break the Haughty: She's an arrogant bitch, and gets a comeuppance the day she is arrested in light of her prostitution activity.
• Expy: She was described BTS as a cross between June Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver and Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss.
• High-Class Call Girl: She prostitutes herself to wealthy men of the neighborhood. Rex is one of her clients.
• Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Her Establishing Character Moment was complaining that Little Red Riding Hood was too violent and they should change the ending. She was also noted for being "perfect" among all the PTA moms. However, Maisy turns out to be a deconstruction, too, as she was really secretly a prostitute to the husbands of Wisteria Lane and revealed that Rex was one of her clients because Bree snubbed her.
• Put on a Bus to Hell: After going to prison.
• Ms. Fanservice: A lot of her scenes were sex sessions.
• Rich Bitch: Judgy, controlling, bitchy, petty, and arrogant along with being an affluent housewife.
• Secret Sex Worker: Maisy keeps the fact that she's an escort a secret from her Stepford Suburbia of Fairview. It only comes out when Bree learns that her husband, Rex, is one of Maisy's clients.

Anne Schilling

Anne Schilling

Played by: Gail O'Grady

The wife of Warren Schilling. She has an affair with Porter Scavo in season 5.

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• The Baby Trap: She tries to trap Porter by pretending to be pregnant.
• Domestic Abuse: She's physically abused by her husband.
• I Lied: She admits to Lynette that she is not pregnant. She lied about being pregnant from Porter in order to keep him with her.
• May–December Romance: She is over twice the age of Porter.
• Mrs. Robinson: She's over 40 and she has an affair with a young neighbor, Porter Scavo, who just hit 18.

Barbara Orlofsky

Barbara Orlofsky

Played by: Diane Farr

The abusive and neglectful mother of Eddie Orlofsky.

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• Abusive Parents: She constantly mocked and belittled her son.
• Aesop Amnesia: Mary Alice Young lectured her on the importance of caring about her progeny after she left a 4-year old Eddie at home without babysitter. She didn't listen. It comes to bite her the day she realizes her son has become a Serial Killer, and she can't put two and two together about the fact that it stemmed from her "education" (or lack thereof), abusive behavior and neglect.
• Alcoholic Parent: She's been drunk for most of Eddie's childhood and early adulthood.
• Asshole Victim: She abused and neglected her son, and she perishes by his hand.
• Jerkass Has a Point: She's an Abusive Parent and Lady Drunk, but she's not wrong when she snaps at Lynette (who rebukes her for how she talks to Eddie) that she sees Eddie as a pet project to throw a free meal at and include in family nights to feel good about herself.
• Lady Drunk: She's well over 40 in season 6 when Eddie is a young man, and by this time she's an alcoholic wreck.
• Lazy Bum: The only things she does by the time of Eddie's early adulthood? Staying at home, and drinking.
• Matricide: On the receiving end of this.
• Parental Neglect: She didn't care one bit about raising Eddie, even having sex with a boyfriend without being bothered that her son would show up and see them, which he did. This would have disastrous consequences on Eddie's psyche as he grew up.
• Struggling Single Mother: Her husband left the household when Eddie was 4 years old.

Mitzi Kinsky

Mitzi Kinsky

Played by: Mindy Sterling

An annoying and selfish resident of Wisteria Lane who many neighbors have a disliking for.

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• Jerkass: She's a pretty obnoxious neighbor.
• Red Herring: For some time in season 7, it seems like she is the traitorous neighbor who sold his/her house to Paul Young so he can have a majority of votes in the street to set up his home for former convicts. It turns out she is not.
• Remember the New Guy?: She's treated like she has been living in Wisteria Lane for a while. She first appeared in season 6.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: To Angie Bolen over waste sorting in season 6.

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