Sordid secrets, evil twins, mind-blowing returns from the dead and love in the afternoon so lushly romantic it makes our knees buckle. We're talking, of course, about daytime soaps, which have been bubbling over with escapist thrills since 1946. Here, like sands through the hourglass, are the grandest, wildest, most shocking moments of our soap-viewing lives — the ones that made us all tune in tomorrow...read more
Washing the windows is no concern when scrubbing bloody floors and covering up illicit affairs are part of your professional duties. Such filthy tasks are all in a day's work for Beverly Hills cleaning ladies Carmen, Marisol, Valentina, Rosie and Zoila. It's enough to turn anyone a little...devious.
Inspired by the hit Mexican telenovela The Disorderly Maids of the Neighborhood, the new Lifetime sudser Devious Maids was adapted for American audiences by Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry and features the same wickedly over-the-top tone. "But there are subtle differences," Cherry explains. "Devious Maids deals with themes of racism, classism and immigration. These women all work in the homes of rich people, but they have goals and dreams that are much greater than the people they work for realize."
The drama begins with the death of a mischievous maid named Flora...read more
It's so hard finding good shows about help these days.
PBS' hit Brit import Downton Abbey, which humanizes the servants and nobility with equal sensitivity and wit, is an exception. In the second cable series within a month depicting the class divide between the unhappy rich and the equally conflicted domestics who tidy their fabulous homes if not their messy lives, both extremes of the economic scale are patronized with cartoonish levels of camp and melodrama.
If you liked Marc Cherry's Desperate Housewives, then you're pretty much already seen Lifetime's Devious Maids — what's next, Dangerous Masseuses? The characters and situations may be different, but creator/executive producer Cherry's signature tone of arch cattiness leavened with sentimental schmaltz is unmistakable...read more