Voice-over narration in Desperate Housewives

Abstract or Introduction

Desperate Housewives is an American comedy-drama serial created by Marc Cherry. After its premiere on October the 3rd, 2004 on “abc” the serial had altogether 111 episodes in six seasons. Desperate Housewives won several awards since its broadcast, like the Emmy, the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild Award. In April 2007 the serial was awarded as most popular show with an audience of over 119 million viewers.
The fictional setting of Wisteria Lane in Fairview is the home of a group of women protagonists: Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria), Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher), Bree Van de Kamp (Marcia Cross), Edie Britt (Nicolette Sheridan) and Katherine Mayfair (Dana Delany) are the main female characters that are more or less friends. All of them have their own specialties and problems in their lives. The plot of each episode follows these struggles they have to deal with in their family lives in domestic surroundings. But with every episode it becomes clearer that even in beautiful and seemingly perfect suburban neighborhoods lots of secrets, crimes and mysteries are buried. The answers to these mysteries are mostly given by another friend of them – Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong) – who died in the pilot episode of Desperate Housewives because she committed suicide.
Mary Alice Young nevertheless appears in the series – but as the narrator of each episode. Her voice leads the viewer through the happenings and through the plot of Desperate Housewives and structures the series with her pro- and epilogues. The following composition is going to deal with the narration of Mary Alice Young and is based on the presentation to the according topic of Desperate Housewives in the seminar “Serial TV”. This term paper will first concentrate on the tradition of voice-over narration and afterwards on general facts of the voice-over narration in Desperate Housewives. In a final step the narration of Mary Alice Young will be discussed.