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Go to http://zocdoc.com/thetake to find and book a top-rated doctor today! 📺 Susan Mayer was Desperate Housewives’ ‘anchor character’ – the everywoman who show creator Marc Cherry...
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00:00Susan Mayer was Desperate Housewives' anchor character,
00:03the Everywoman, whose show creator, Mark Cherry,
00:05designed to be lovable and relatable.
00:07Although on paper Susan was inoffensive,
00:10there was something about her that audiences loved to hate.
00:14It's like a meeting of the I Hate Susan Club.
00:17Over the course of eight seasons,
00:19the Housewives met with murder, fraud, bribery, and so much more.
00:23So what exactly was it about Susan,
00:26a seemingly innocent girl-next-door type,
00:28that made her the show's unintentional villain for so many?
00:32I hate Susan Mayer.
00:34Every time I see those big doe-eyes of hers,
00:37I swear to God I just want to go out and shoot a deer.
00:40The world of television is packed with central characters
00:43who become unintentionally hated.
00:45Ross Geller, Piper Chapman, and Carrie Bradshaw
00:48all fell victim to the ire of audiences,
00:50despite not being initially written as villains.
00:53Like Susan, they're all part of ensemble casts,
00:56and also like Susan, in the case of Carrie and Piper,
00:58they're often the character we're expected to identify with,
01:01the allegedly most quote-unquote normal person
01:04in a group of caricatures.
01:06In fact, actress Terri Hatcher has mentioned
01:08that she identifies with Susan herself.
01:10One of the ways you said you were like Susan, your character,
01:14first of all, you say she's insecure, you're insecure.
01:17They picked me as the most neurotic,
01:18which initially hurt my feelings.
01:20I think the good side of neurotic, I worry about things.
01:22When there's as much drama in a show as there is in,
01:25for example, Orange is the New Black or Desperate Housewives,
01:28sometimes the moments that speak to us the most
01:30are the ones that are genuinely recognizable.
01:33That's why we have characters like Susan,
01:35who keep us grounded in the crazier storylines.
01:37So while Carlos embezzled millions,
01:39Brie built an empire, and Mrs. McCluskey kept her husband's dead body in her freezer,
01:45Susan's relatively simple life was something we could relate to more.
01:49But that didn't work out well for Susan over time with the audience,
01:52because it meant her bad decisions, like lying to her partner,
01:56or forcing her daughter to act like an adult in their relationship,
01:59felt all the more real.
02:00I didn't do it to hurt you.
02:02You gotta believe me.
02:05I should have told you right away.
02:06I know that, but you know now, so can we please talk about it?
02:10With anchor characters, because the show is ostensibly about them,
02:13they often read as narcissists.
02:15Then I thought maybe for a second,
02:17that Susan Meyer lady and I could be friends.
02:20And then she started talking.
02:21They kind of need to be written that way,
02:23to propel the story forward and flesh out the history.
02:26But that doesn't account for how abhorrent they can be.
02:30With Susan, everything is about her,
02:32so when she discovers her husband Mike is addicted to painkillers,
02:35she immediately asks if it's because of her.
02:37Susan, listen.
02:38Is it so horrible living with me?
02:40I mean, do I make you so miserable that you can't even face me without numbing the pain?
02:45Susan is the archetypal person who says they definitely hate drama,
02:49but just always somehow ends up being right in the middle of it.
02:52Always convinced that she's just an innocent doe snared by chaos,
02:56and refusing to admit that she's often the driver of the drama.
02:59Even actor James Denton, who played Susan's two-time husband Mike on the show,
03:03highlighted how much drama Susan brought with her everywhere she went,
03:07and why his character might want respite from that in subsequent relationships.
03:11I think it makes a lot of sense if Mike's going to go,
03:13whatever reason he goes away from Susan,
03:15he's going to be drawn to somebody like Katherine.
03:17Less drama, more grounded, more stable.
03:20She's sort of the anti-Susan, so people that tell me,
03:23they don't make any sense together.
03:24They make perfect sense together.
03:25She's also immature, and the way she behaves towards the people
03:29who she's meant to care about is often tough to watch,
03:31particularly Mike and Julie, who only very occasionally clap back.
03:35Her toxic relationship with Julie, where Julie is expected to act like a parent to Susan,
03:40became a major point of contention with many viewers,
03:43resulting in her ranking on lists of TV's worst mothers.
03:46In Susan's case, it's not just that she's self-obsessed.
03:50As culture reporter Laura Bradley wrote in Vanity Fair,
03:53like all the women of Wisteria Lane, Susan had her flaws.
03:56She was a busybody, a klutz, and pretty self-involved.
03:59But more than any of the others, she viewed herself as an innocent damsel.
04:03In a show about strong women, Susan's weaknesses are conspicuous,
04:08with her perception of her own innocence and her inability to take accountability
04:12for some of her misdemeanors makes her seem a bit pathetic.
04:15You know, I so much want to like you, but you just won't let me.
04:20Edie, Susan, you know, I try. I try to look past your flaws,
04:25your klutziness, that, that faux vulnerability.
04:29Sometimes being the main character in your own story is awesome,
04:32like when you get to decide to take some time, treat yourself, and chill.
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05:54Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the female characters
05:58who end up being heavily criticized by audiences are written by men,
06:02writing what they think female audiences want to see.
06:05Carrie Bradshaw is a great example, as is Susan.
06:08In fact, Desperate Housewives has long been dogged by rumors that show creator
06:12Mark Cherry had a problem with women.
06:14This extended to a lawsuit filed by Nicolette Sheridan,
06:17the actress who played Edie Britt, who claimed he assaulted her on set.
06:21And numerous other people who were involved in the show's creation
06:23made allegations of misogyny in the writers' room.
06:26And it is, at least on its face, kind of confusing that Susan,
06:29a character who Cherry dreamed up to show the struggles of an average single parent,
06:34came to be hated by the audience she was supposedly created for.
06:38But then Desperate Housewives also aired in the 2000s,
06:41an era where internalized misogyny in the audience,
06:44and even amongst the actresses on the show, was rife.
06:48She's a slut.
06:49She's a whore.
06:51Cherry told interviewers that Susan was based on his own single friends,
06:54and that he thought there was something so real about a woman saying,
06:58I don't have much time left.
06:59And when this available hunky guy moves onto the street,
07:02something in her saying,
07:03let me at him.
07:04But the way she was realized on screen didn't actually end up showing
07:07the realities of that situation in a way that felt genuine
07:10or recognizable to viewers.
07:12It didn't show Susan as a capable parent who was ready for love.
07:15Rather, the writers made her seem, well, desperate.
07:18That guy just smiles at me three times,
07:20and I'm picking out wedding china.
07:22I'm a mess.
07:23Part of what's frustrating about the character of Susan is how much potential she had
07:26to be a poster girl for authentic positivity in the face of some major problems.
07:31Yet, instead of an inspirational woman and single mother,
07:34we got one who was self-centered,
07:36and often seemingly incapable of introspection,
07:39not to mention constantly failing her daughter.
07:42Okay.
07:42And don't play the parent card with me.
07:44I just finished packing your suitcase,
07:46doing your laundry, and balancing your checkbook.
07:47The audience was shocked that Susan was more concerned
07:50with her budding relationship with Mike than she was with Julie,
07:53which in many ways exemplifies the misogyny of the early 2000s,
07:56where women had the illusion of sexual empowerment,
07:59but were still judged for pursuing it.
08:01And when Susan did finally get her man,
08:04rather than letting their relationship blossom,
08:06the writers tore it all up.
08:07You know, it's tough,
08:08because if you just keep them as a happily married couple,
08:11happiness is lovely, but it's kind of the death of drama.
08:14We know that that's not really true.
08:16There are plenty of on-screen marriages that managed to stand the test of time
08:20without draining the excitement from their shows.
08:22But Susan's inability to make it work with rugged,
08:25handsome Mike was frustrating for many to watch,
08:28particularly when she pushed him to feeling inadequate.
08:31All I have heard about are car seats,
08:33and strollers, and $10,000 preschools.
08:36Like, we don't need any of that stuff.
08:39Yeah.
08:40You say that.
08:41Now.
08:42But when Benjamin Hodge is in Harvard,
08:45and our kid's just a plumber like his dad.
08:47Unintentional female villains don't always appear as the result of male writers
08:52who don't understand how to make realistic or sympathetic female characters.
08:56Sometimes the problem stems from the audience themselves.
09:00Take Breaking Bad's Skylar White, who got a lot of hate from viewers
09:03because she didn't approve of her husband's meth-making side hustle.
09:08If that sounds ludicrous, well, it kind of is.
09:10Audiences seemed able to accept that Walter putting his entire family in danger
09:14and ruining lives was totally fine,
09:16yet complained that Skylar came across as whiny and was a nagging wife,
09:21just because she had totally reasonable problems with it and wasn't afraid to voice them.
09:25As Anna Gunn, the actress who played Skylar, wrote in the New York Times,
09:28male characters don't seem to inspire this kind of public venting and vitriol.
09:33Regardless of how some of the audience might have felt about Skylar,
09:36she was very much written as a real,
09:38normal person with understandable problems and irritations.
09:41Susan, on the other hand, was stretched to unbelievably because she was written more as
09:46an idea than a person, a jumble of traits that kind of fit together but never quite felt genuine.
09:53She was presented as being the most true-to-life character on the show,
09:56the audience surrogate and someone we could run into in real life.
10:00And to be fair, many of her wants and needs are pretty normal,
10:04if ratcheted up a bit for 2000s-level soap drama.
10:07But that combination only meant that her most grating traits would be magnified,
10:12leading audiences to constantly feel more and more annoyed as they came to realize
10:16that this wasn't part of some sort of character growth or learning arc,
10:20but just the way she is.
10:22Coming to the realization that the audience they were ostensibly writing for does not like or relate to the
10:28character they intended to be in every woman can be a bit of a surprise for writers,
10:32especially back in the 90s and aughts,
10:34when writers were generally more removed from fan reactions outside of reviews and viewership numbers.
10:40In reaction, some writers chose to soften the rougher edges of their more grating female characters.
10:45Sex and the City more or less ignored criticism of Carrie during the show's initial run,
10:49but in more recent years, the team has used the reboot, and Just Like That,
10:53to respond to seemingly every criticism level that the original show since it aired,
10:58to almost comic effect.
11:00But in the case of Susan, instead of overcompensating by making her better,
11:04it felt like the writers chose to humiliate her and put her through hell,
11:08almost as if they were providing catharsis to the audience by punishing her.
11:13It was common knowledge on Wisteria Lane where Susan Meyer went,
11:17bad luck was sure to follow.
11:18Her misfortunes ranged from the commonplace,
11:21to the unusual, to the truly bizarre.
11:25So Susan's arc went from slightly pathetic to kind of miserable.
11:28She lost her home on Wisteria Lane, turned to cam work to make ends meet.
11:33You did porn on the internet?
11:35No, it was just cleaning, in lingerie.
11:38And then, when everything looked like it was finally going to be okay,
11:41Mike was killed in a drive-by shooting.
11:43The storylines became so depressing that some fans even called it out.
11:47But there's still a healthy discourse on message boards reviling Susan,
11:51even if the writers did do her dirty.
11:53Ultimately, there's something compelling about Susan,
11:56and the way that she irritates us.
11:58We enjoy seeing characters like Edie get the better of her,
12:01and rejoice when Julie finally drums up the courage
12:04to tell her she's been a bad mom.
12:05That is why I don't want to have this baby on my own.
12:11Because I already raised a child.
12:14You.
12:15But it's likely that if she was written today,
12:17she'd be humanized much more.
12:19TV writers are becoming much more respectful of the female experience,
12:23including the facets of Susan's life that,
12:25back in the early 2000s, trapped her in cliches.
12:28We now have shows like Maid, Good Girls, Big Little Lies,
12:32and better things, which show the realities of single motherhood
12:35and its complexities in sometimes painful detail.
12:38And we also get to see women like Susan experiencing joy, too,
12:42finding partners who stick around,
12:43and getting a lot of happiness from their families and careers.
12:46So maybe Susan wasn't so bad.
12:49She was just imagined at the wrong time.
12:52That's the take.
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