By Katie Monigan

Arts & Life Editor

Season seven of Desperate Housewives began in late September, but three episodes later, the writers have exhausted all possible ideas for plotlines.

The series has had some seriously surprising events in past seasons—tornadoes, planes crashing into lawn parties, murder and a few inconveniently-timed pregnancies—but this season is not just surprising, it’s plain strange.

Paul’s back from jail, where he’s been since very early in the series, and he’s married. The wedding took place while he was in jail, andhis wife refuses to have a physical relationship with him. She simply wants to cook and clean for him.

Susan and Mike had money troubles in season six, so Susan began teaching art to pay for her son’s education. This season, she’s taken it to a new level and now streams video online of herself cleaning the house in her lingerie.

Weirdest of all, Gabrielle and Carlos discover that a drunken nurse was working in Fairview Memorial hospital the day their daughter was born. The nurse switched Juanita with another baby eight years ago.

Desperate Housewives was, at one point, about a group of scandalous ladies with very interesting pasts who happened to live in the same neighborhood. Now everyone’s either married or just boring, and all the scandal is gone. Its family drama and unrealistic plot twists barely make sense.

Without Edie to spice things up, and now that Susan and Gabrielle are married with children, the sources of drama have switched from scandalous secret affairs to incredibly obscure character development, and the show is far less appealing. This is another series that has passed its prime. Six seasons was enough.