Affairs, murders, a faked pregnancy and a freak tornado that left Gabrielle’s husband impaled on a flying fence post. For eight seasons, from 2004 to 2012, who wasn’t glued to their TV screen watching the ever-weirder goings-on among the Desperate Housewives of Wisteria Lane?

The female stars became household names. Their larger-than-life characters skewered our own aspirations and foibles, whether we liked to admit it or not, yet the show never took itself too seriously. Which is perhaps why the series, now streaming on Disney, has become an unexpected hit with Gen Z, with over two billion views of the #desperatehousewives hashtag on TikTok.

After years of worthy television shows, younger viewers appear beguiled by its silliness – so much so that a spin-off series, currently titled Wisteria Lane and featuring five different ‘frenemies’ living in an impeccable cul-de-sac, was recently announced. But whatever happened to the original stars?

Here, we reveal the successes and scandals that came after the cameras stopped rolling…

TERI HATCHER, 60: THE ‘DIFFICULT’ CAST MEMBER LEFT DATING HER CAT

Hatcher played the show’s emotional anchor and ‘mom next door’ Susan Meyer, but in real life has a reputation as something of a prickly queen bee.

Desperate Housewives writer Patty Lin recalled in her memoir that the creators would see the cast at read-throughs ‘where we’d sit quietly at the back and try not to make eye contact with Teri Hatcher’.

The impression she was tricky to work with – sparked by a disastrous 2005 Vanity Fair photoshoot with the female Housewives stars, which left Teri in tears – has followed her since.

Her name was omitted from the stars’ gift for the crew when the show ended (‘I don’t really know who gave or did what,’ she said), and executive producer Marc Cherry later recalled ‘a big star with some big behavioural problems’ on the series. ‘Everyone tried their darnedest to get along with this woman over the course of the show. It was impossible.’

Hatcher’s name wasn’t mentioned but she was widely assumed to be the guilty party.

Best known before Desperate Housewives as Lois Lane in the 1990s series The New Adventures Of Superman, Hatcher has married twice – to personal trainer Markus Leithold in 1988 and actor Jon Tenny between 1994 and 2003, with whom she has daughter Emerson, 27.

Currently single, Teri was recently kicked off dating app Hinge when her profile was suspected of being fake. ‘I don’t need a man,’ she told an interviewer last year, adding: ‘I don’t date much. I mostly date my cat.’

Men, she went on, were not ‘lining up’ like they used to when she was younger – and gone are the days when she would look at a man and think: ‘I wonder if we’re going to end up in bed together?’ Nowadays, she joked, she eyes up a potential partner and thinks: ‘When am I going have to change this guy’s diapers?’

Certainly, there is plenty of room for her pet moggy to roam at home. Hatcher’s 4,100 sq ft property in Los Angeles comes complete with koi pond and outdoor kitchen, and was listed for rent at £23,000 a month in 2018 while Teri was away filming – not, as was reported at the time, because she was broke. ‘I am not homeless and I am not living out of my van,’ said Teri.

POST-HOUSEWIVES HIGH

Reinventing herself as a cookery influencer, combining online videos with mental health support, as per her latest Instagram recipe for a poached chicken snack: ‘Club your feelings with this nutrition-dense sandwich!’

POST-HOUSEWIVES LOW

In 2016 Teri joined CBS sitcom The Odd Couple, a remake of the 1970s original, starring Matthew Perry, which was a critical and commercial flop. One reviewer described it as ‘the laziest TV show of all time’.

UP FOR A REUNION?

Probably not, although she said cryptically in 2023: ‘I think the women would probably all do it.’

FELICITY HUFFMAN, 62: SCANDAL-HIT STAR WHO SERVED PRISON TIME

Huffman’s character, neurotic and controlling advertising executive Lynette Scavo, is widely regarded as the ‘smartest’ of the Housewives. Yet today, Huffman is principally known off-set for her spectacularly dim role in the US college admissions scandal.

This saw celebrities pull strings to get their children into university – she paid someone £11,000 to falsify her daughter Sophia’s exam scores. It earned her a well-documented 11-day stint in a Californian prison in October 2019.

‘I did it. It’s black and white,’ she later said, apologising ‘to the students and the families that sacrifice and work really hard to get to where they are going legitimately’.

Her Housewives co-star Ricardo Chavira, who played Carlos Solis, suggested that race was a factor in her short sentence. Along with a link to a news article about the case, he tweeted: ‘White Privilege. And I saw Eight years worth of it, so I know what I’m talking about. Accountability and Responsibility don’t mean s*** to these people.’

He followed it with a second tweet saying: ‘I saw eight years worth of it working on Housewives.’

She’s married to actor William H Macy, despite once saying she was ‘so scared of marriage… I thought I would’ve preferred to step in front of a bus’. She has two daughters – Sophia and Georgia – and counts Eva Longoria and Marcia Cross as her best friends on the show.

Nominated for an Oscar for her role as a transgender woman in the 2005 film Transamerica, she lives with Macy in a Colorado retreat on the same plot of land where she grew up, which her husband suggested they reclaim after her mother’s death.

POST-HOUSEWIVES HIGH

The only lead Desperate Housewives actress to win an Emmy for her role, Huffman was nominated for three further Emmys for playing Barb Hanlon in ABC drama American Crime between 2015 and 2017.

POST-HOUSEWIVES LOW

Struggling to find work after prison. ‘It’s been hard. Sort of like your old life died and you died with it,’ she said in an interview last year. ‘I guess I’m still processing.’

UP FOR A REUNION?

Sort of. Huffman is a ‘huge fan’ of Kerry Washington, the Wisteria Lane reboot’s executive producer, but joked she will be on the sidelines doing ‘craft services’ – which in film lingo means providing drinks and snacks on set.

MARCIA CROSS, 63: CANCER BATTLE THAT BECAME HER CAUSE

Cross played Bree Van de Kamp, a stay-at-home mum whose bid to create a perfect life is hindered by challenges like divorce, widowhood and alcoholism.

Perhaps the lowest profile of the main actors, Cross is married to stockbroker Tom Mahoney, whom she describes as her family’s ‘rock and sun’. Her twin daughters Savannah and Eden were born after IVF shortly before her 45th birthday in February 2007.

‘I don’t like that much attention when I’m out on my own, you know?’ she said in a 2023 interview. ‘If I’m with my husband I don’t really like to be noticed. I’m a little more of an introvert.’

And yet it was apparently Cross who took umbrage at Hatcher taking centre stage in that infamous Vanity Fair photoshoot, according to the author of the accompanying article.

Seeing Hatcher steal the show in an ‘eye-popping cherry-red bathing suit’, Cross reportedly ‘exploded, grabbed her bathrobe, and walked off the set’.

POST-HOUSEWIVES HIGH

Motherhood, which she has said ‘cracks your heart wide open’. High-profile acting roles have been hard to come by – ‘Hollywood is not particularly interested,’ she said in 2023 – but she made her modelling debut for designer Farfetch’s spring/summer campaign that year.

POST-HOUSEWIVES LOW

Being diagnosed with anal cancer in 2017. ‘What are the odds that I am playing the most uptight character on TV and then I get the kind of cancer that nobody wants to talk about?’ she later asked. She now campaigns to raise awareness of the disease.

UP FOR A REUNION?

Wouldn’t rule it out. ‘It was a dream job,’ she has said of the show. ‘I felt so lucky every single time I went to work.’

EVA LONGORIA, 50: SHOW’S SUCCESS STORY – WHO FLED TO SPAIN

Longoria played Gabrielle Solis, the former model whose family come from Mexico. Since the show finished, she has been easily the most prolific star, last year appearing in hit TV series Only Murders In The Building.

Running in starry circles, she is one of the Beckhams’ best pals, having met the family when they moved to Los Angeles in 2007.

While Longoria described Victoria as ‘the funniest person’, Victoria called her the ‘smartest, most beautiful woman I have ever met’. Longoria is godmother – aka ‘a crazy aunt that spoils her’ – to Harper Beckham.

Indeed Eva wore a Victoria Beckham-made wedding dress to marry third husband, Mexican mogul Jose Baston, in 2016, having met him on a blind date three years before.

Their seven-year-old son Santiago has given her ‘new eyes on the world’, but the strangest discovery of all surely came in 2010 during a genealogy television series when her cousin was revealed to be Meryl Streep.

Longoria also attended Lauren Sanchez’s bachelorette party in Paris, though she missed the actual wedding to Jeff Bezos in Venice.

Last year Longoria swapped California for a six-bedroom villa in Marbella, Spain, having become disillusioned by the political situation in America.

‘I get to escape and go somewhere. Most Americans aren’t so lucky. They’re going to be stuck in this dystopian country, and my anxiety and sadness is for them,’ says the former beauty pageant contestant, who turned up in LA with ‘no money, no car and no job’ before landing roles in Beverly Hills 90210 and CBS soap The Young And The Restless prior to Desperate Housewives. In 2008, racy lingerie shots of Longoria in PVC boots emerged from her time working as a model looking for a break in Hollywood.

She famously stood up for Huffman when the latter was charged with fraud in 2019. As one of 27 people who wrote a letter to the judge defending Huffman’s character, Longoria said she’d been bullied by an unidentified character throughout the show.

‘I dreaded the days I had to go to work with that person because it was pure torture,’ she wrote. ‘Until one day Felicity told the bully “enough” and it all stopped. Felicity could feel that I was riddled with anxiety even though I never complained or mentioned the abuse to anyone.’ She added: ‘I know I would not have survived those ten years if it wasn’t for the friendship of Felicity.’

POST-HOUSEWIVES HIGH

As well as being a regular fixture on the red carpet and screens of all kind – her 10.7million Instagram following dwarfs her fellow stars’ followings – she’s now a director and activist for Latina rights, saying last year she’s ‘the busiest I’ve ever been’.

POST-HOUSEWIVES LOW

The aftermath of her 2011 divorce to second husband, NBA player Tony Parker, after reportedly discovering hundreds of texts from another woman on his phone. ‘I was not eating. I was depressed. I was sad. My diet was coffee,’ she said.

UP FOR A REUNION?

Potentially. ‘I miss being on that set. I miss everything about it,’ she said in 2017.

NICOLLETTE SHERIDAN, 61: KILLED OFF, BUT FINALLY BOUNCING BACK

Edie Britt, played by Nicollette Sheridan, was an estate agent and a man-eater, whose relationships with the ex-husbands and former lovers of the other characters added spice to Wisteria Lane.

Sheridan, who was born in Sussex and moved to the US as a child, dated singer Michael Bolton in the 1990s and again in the Noughties.

She has since married and split from actors Harry Hamlin and Aaron Phypers and is now believed to be single. ‘Marriage has never been something I’ve needed to have in my life,’ she has said.

Sheridan claimed her character Edie was killed off (electrocuted, in typically OTT style) in season five of Desperate Housewives because executive producer Marc Cherry had hit her over the head and she’d reported the ‘assault’. In 2010, she sued Cherry and ABC network for £15 million. The case was eventually thrown out, with other Housewives’ stars making statements in support of Cherry.

She is a staunch animal welfare activist. ‘My dogs have taught me to be more loving, more nurturing and happier,’ she said.

POST-HOUSEWIVES HIGH

A return to man-eating form playing Alexis Carrington in the 2017 re-make of Dynasty.

POST-HOUSEWIVES LOW

What she describes as her ‘degrading and demoralising’ exit from the series, that sent Sheridan ‘under a rock’.

UP FOR A REUNION?

That’d be a bit difficult. Apart from all the off-screen drama, Sheridan said of Edie: ‘I loved her dearly, but they killed her.’

PS. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SEXY GARDENER?

Jesse Metcalfe, now 46, set hearts racing as teenage gardener John Rowland, who had an affair with Gabrielle (above). An instant pin-up, Metcalfe dated Girls Aloud singer Nadine Coyle from 2006 to 2008, a relationship which, he said at the time, was ‘ruining my life’. He split with his fiancée of four years, actor Cara Santana, in 2020 and is said to be dating estate agent Helene Immel.

Metcalfe has spoken of a long-term friendship with the Duchess of Sussex, with whom he apparently goes back ‘many years’.

UP FOR A REUNION?

In principle. ‘I could be one of the parents of the younger cast,’ he has said.