The cultural impact of the United States is well proven but it is only in the past year or so that American television series have made serious inroads into the consciousness of the Chinese masses. The more sophisticated viewers in China's main cities have graduated quickly from Sex and the City to CSI, and now to that absorbing, outrageous, tightly-scripted, over-acted and over-produced melodramatic mix of subur-ban American sleaze known as Desperate Housewives.

With little progress being made on hinder-ing the availability of liberated copies of these shows, China's state media is fighting back in the only way it can, by broadcasting the show on national television. The premier TV network, CCTV, has bought the rights to the Desperate Housewives series, and is expected to start screening episodes with Mandarin dubbing by the end of this year. It will almost certainly be a must-watch from Harbin to Hainan, just as outside China, it has already kept potatoes gripped to their couches from Hong Kong to Harlem.

Cultural perspectives

Without giving too much of the story away, the show starts in a highly risque way with a typical and ideal American housewife committing sui-cide, apparently because she just cannot stand the restrictive fakeness of the perfect housewife existence any more. The show is then narrated by the suicide victim, post-death, in an echo of that wonderful movie, American Beauty, to which it owes a lot more than just that idea.

The show, to be aired on CCTV-8, is surely going to have to be snipped to some extent to meet China's public standards of prudery. But hopefully not too much. This sort of television show is best when it is outrageous, and Desperate Housewives tends to lose its sparkle whenever it drifts towards the regular American TV show approach to characters and plot.

The show is tightly produced in a quality mov-ie-like format, which far exceeds the standards of TV shows produced in China or anywhere else. It is not just slick, it is superbly choreographed. But a big question is how Chinese viewers will relate to the main characters. Most of what happens in the show makes perfect sense from any cultural perspective, once the essentials of American society and melodrama have been ac-cepted, but not all of it. This is where the cultural gap is exposed.

Let us review the characters from the China perspective:

Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman): She has four children and a fulltime job as a mother, having given up her high-powered career in advertising. She is harried and ef.cient, patient and frustrated, exasperated and calm. Chinese mothers will relate to her easily, some (but not all) will be jealous of her right to have so many children, but will still be puzzled by the mayhem that is allowed to reign in both home and school in the Land of the Free.

Bree Van De Kamp (Marcia Cross): This is the character that Chinese people can most identify with. She is organized, house-proud, much more concerned with outward appear-ances than with the messiness of reality. She handles her children with strictness and formal-ity, and even though the kids despise her for it, it feels normal and reasonable from a China perspective.

Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher): Puzzlingly the star of the show. A divorcee and single mother, she has a chatty relationship with her 11-year-old daughter that will de.nitely feel weird to Chinese people. In Shijiazhuang, mothers are not discussing their sexual problems with their daughters.

Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria): Every Chi-nese woman knows this character, although not usually in the role of wife. Gabrielle is the classic mistress that all Chinese wives fear. Having her in the housewife role feels strange, but her mistress persona transcends the apparent inconsistency.

Edie Britt (Nicollette Sheridan): The blonde real estate agent and serial divorcee is another character that makes little sense in China's cultural context. But she can, of course, be explained away by saying: "It's America".

The show is also interesting from a Chinese perspective because it depicts a neighborhood . Wisteria Avenue . which is, in every way, the ideal that China's middle classes are striving for. The wealth, the luxury of living, the rich mate-rial possessions, the whole American Dream is there to see in all its Technicolor glory. But the message of the show is that the dream is .awed, the apple has a worm eating away at its core, the Western materialist lifestyle is not all it is cracked up to be.

Hmmm . has this show been chosen for airing in China for devious ideological reasons?

Could be.