‘Desperate Housewives’ is all about Bree

[Spoiler warning: This story speculates on what will happen on "Desperate Housewives" this season. Don't want to know? Don't read.]

It's easy to pick a favorite character on ABC's hit "Desperate Housewives." Some viewers identify with quirky Susan, the lovable goofball who lets her daughter mother her more than she should. Harried Lynnette may not be June Cleaver, but her troubles with an army of bratty children is at least recognizable. Up until her husband's prison woes and her own unplanned pregnancy, Gabrielle lived a dream life — glamorous looks, tons of money, little responsibility (or morals, it seems). Edie too has her fans, since she's one of the few Wisteria Lane residents to tell it like it is.

But in the first season of "Housewives," it was Marcia Cross' Bree who held the show together, and it was her tragedy in the season finale that will direct the second season of the hit show.

Bree had it all together when the season began. She was preppy-lovely, if a bit of an ice queen. Unlike Susan, her marriage had (seemingly) held together. Unlike Lynette, her children were beyond tantrum stage and required less of her attention. Unlike Gabrielle, she seemed to have a solid sense of herself and her place in the world. She was a mother, a wife, a woman who'd done her time in the trenches of child-care and struggle. Her life was neat, her china polished, her designer ensembles perfectly pressed.

From her position as the oldest member of the "Housewives" coffee klatch, she could dispense advice to the younger women. In fact, when Lynette was at the end of her rope with the terrible twins, it was a smartly administered, good old-fashioned spanking from Bree that snapped the boys, at least temporarily, back into line. (Lynette was at first horrified, but later wasn't above using future Bree spankings as a threat to encourage good behavior.)

But Bree's perfection was itself a mask, and it started cracking early. In the very first episode, her family rebelled against her starched family dinners, and it's at a restaurant that husband Rex asks for a divorce. In response, she nearly kills him in a most domestic way, serving him onions despite his deadly allergy. She claims to want counseling, but even there, her decades of stiff perfection interfere — she's so focused on a loose button on the doctor's jacket that she can't, or won't, face the dissolution of her own marriage.

The dark side of Bree
Bree is no innocent, undeserving of blame for her problems. She did some awful things in the show's first season, understandable perhaps, but still things that would cause Miss Manners to faint dead away. She told an entire dinner party about Rex's tendency towards tears at, uh, intimate moments. When she discovered her son, Andrew, had gone to a strip club, she took the door off his bedroom. When Rex leaves her and gives the children gifts, she tells them they'll be kicked out of her home unless they return the gifts. Bree isn't quite Mother of the Year material.

Sometimes there was a good heart deep inside the Chanel suits. Bree often acted according to the rules of her preppy code, then regretted it. When Andrew caused a hit-and-run accident, she wanted to help him cover it up, yet also slowly became shocked at his lack of remorse. When she discoverd he was smoking pot, she dropped an anonymous tip to his school, getting him kicked off the swim team. She has few qualms, it seems, about sending him to a juvenile detention center after he's expelled from school. But once he's there, she's all but destroyed by his lack of affection for her — although not so much as to accept him when he claims to be gay.

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