Avant-garde and absurdist giants, from Lewis Carroll to Kafka to David Foster Wallace, have been acclaimed for manipulating reality and creating masterpieces of fractured storytelling. All of these guys are total amateurs, compared to the people behind Mistresses, the ABC series which revolves around a devoted group of female friends in Los Angeles. I need to take a moment, to simply share what has befallen these valiant ladies during the show’s first two seasons.
1. Dr. Karen Kim – Dr. Kim, a therapist given to tight sheaths and swoopy bangs, started the series as the mistress of one of her married patients. Because this fellow had a fatal illness, she secretly and illegally helped him commit assisted suicide. Almost immediately following her paramour’s death, Dr. Kim began a torrid affair with his young son. The son was eventually shot to death by his own mother, who was understandably aiming at Dr. Kim. After being briefly suspended, Dr. Kim returned to her practice by treating a young woman with whom Dr. Kim was soon sharing a boyfriend. Dr. Kim then had her patient move into her home, because the patient was living in a shabby apartment. Dr. Kim finally and completely solved her patient’s extreme anxiety and self-esteem issues by counseling her to move back to Korea, which she did. Dr. Kim, flushed with success, has just decided to stop being a therapist in order to “find out who I really am.” Oh, and I left out the part where Dr. Kim began going to hotel bars, while wearing miniskirts and various wigs, and became a quasi-hooker using many assumed names.
2. April owns a homewares boutique. Her first husband faked his own death, but then reappears, with an additional wife and child. April is miffed, but still attracted, until she finally sends the guy packing. Then April falls for a handsome artist, but she discovers that whenever he claims to be “visiting his family’s home in Vermont”, he’s actually staying in LA and cheating on her. April dumps him, but she’s just discovered that he’s secretly an FBI agent, who’s been tracking her in order to capture her first husband, who’s now working for a drug kingpin. The FBI blackmails April into helping them. April should never, ever date.
3. Savi (short for Savannah) is a lawyer, who cheats on her handsome Australian chef husband once, and becomes pregnant by an equally handsome partner at her firm. Just as she’s about to choose between these two hunks, she gets hit by a car, loses the baby, and stays in a coma for quite a while. After regaining consciousness, she begins a relationship with the guy whose truck hit her. None of this matters, because here’s Savi’s true dilemma: Savi is being played by the appealing Alyssa Milano, who was pregnant in real life over the course of the entire second season. Alyssa’s pregnancy was never written into the script, so as she grew larger and larger, steps were taken to disguise her condition. At first she wore multiple layers of coats and cardigans, even indoors, like a refugee. Then she began holding enormous designer handbags over her midsection, until the handbags became the size of steamer trunks. Then she began to huddle beneath nubby throws and cover her stomach with gargantuan accent pillows. Finally, she was so sizeable that she could only be shot in a tight close-up, or crouching behind tabletops and the backs of armchairs. She’d scuttle out of rooms, like a hunchbacked hobbit.
We won’t even begin to discuss Joss, the bisexual real estate broker turned event planner, and her upcoming wedding to a shoe fetishist. The lesson, to writers everywhere, is this: ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN AT ANY TIME, IF YOU WANT IT TO.
