★Now Showing — Films, Shows, and the Tools to Pick Them★
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Big Little Lies
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15 Shows Like Desperate Housewives — Suburban Secrets, Murder Mysteries, and Delicious Drama

Wisteria Lane left a void no other street could fill — until these shows arrived. Suburban scandals, female ensembles, dark secrets, and the soapy drama that keeps you watching at 1am.

15 FILMS·April 2026·By MoviesPack
Section 1

The Wisteria Lane Formula

Desperate Housewives ran for eight seasons and understood exactly what it was: **a black comedy about the violence required to maintain the appearance of a perfect life**. The women of Wisteria Lane weren't silly — they were navigating genuinely dark circumstances with varying degrees of competence, and the show's genius was treating the suburban setting as the most dangerous place in America. These 15 shows know what they are with the same self-awareness. [Use our tool: Shows Like Desperate Housewives](/shows/similar/desperate-housewives) — algorithmically matched

Section 2

The Closest Matches

Big Little Lies
01

Big Little Lies

2017–2019
★8.4IMDb
Five women in Monterey, California — wealthy, friendly, seemingly fine — attend the same school fundraiser where someone ends up dead. The show tells the story of the weeks leading up to it: a woman hiding what her husband does to her, a new arrival everyone resents and no one understands, a first-grade conflict between kids that explodes into something far worse. Based on Liane Moriarty's novel. Nicole Kidman gives the performance of her career in a show that's really about domestic abuse, female solidarity, and how well-off women protect terrible men.
Why it matters

Same structure — female ensemble, upscale setting, a murder that gradually reveals everyone's secrets. The HBO budget makes Monterey look as immaculate and false as Wisteria Lane, and the show is equally clear-eyed about what's hidden underneath.

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Why Women Kill
02

Why Women Kill

2019–2021
★7.7IMDb
Three women — a 1960s housewife whose husband is gay, an 1980s socialite whose husband is having an affair, and a 2020s woman in an open marriage navigating jealousy she didn't expect — all live in the same Pasadena house across different decades, all dealing with the same fundamental problem: their marriages are built on lies. The tone is exactly right: dark, funny, stylish, and more savage about the institution of marriage than mainstream television usually allows itself to be.
Why it matters

Same creator as Desperate Housewives (Marc Cherry), same DNA. More explicitly satirical, more willing to let the women be morally complex.

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Devious Maids
03

Devious Maids

2013–2016
★7.1IMDb
Four Latina maids working for wealthy Beverly Hills families investigate the murder of a fellow maid found dead at her employer's party. The show is explicitly about the class lines Desperate Housewives largely took for granted — who does the domestic labor of maintaining beautiful surfaces, and what they see while doing it. The women doing the cleaning see everything their employers would prefer stayed invisible. Campy, fun, and more politically aware than it initially appears.
Why it matters

Same tone, same creator (Marc Cherry again), same pleasure of watching beautiful people in beautiful homes do terrible things — with the class angle sharpened.

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Revenge
04

Revenge

2011–2015
★7.7IMDb
Emily Thorne moves into a beach house in the Hamptons and becomes part of the social scene — and spends four seasons systematically destroying the family that framed her father for a terrorist attack he didn't commit. Every invitation she accepts is a step in a plan she's been working on for years. Emily VanCamp's cold-blooded commitment to the premise never wavers, and the Hamptons serve the same function Wisteria Lane does: a world of apparent perfection where everyone has something to hide.
Why it matters

Same satisfying mechanics of secrets, betrayal, and comeuppance — with the mystery replaced by explicit vengeance. One of the most binge-watchable dramas of the 2010s.

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Pretty Little Liars
05

Pretty Little Liars

2010–2017
★7.4IMDb
A year after their queen bee friend Alison disappears, four girls in the wealthy Pennsylvania town of Rosewood start receiving threatening messages from someone called "A" who knows every secret they've ever had — including what they were doing the night Alison vanished. Seven seasons of escalating paranoia, and the show gets increasingly unhinged in the best possible way. The central female friendships are genuinely well-developed through all the chaos.
Why it matters

Same small-town-with-secrets aesthetic, same escalating revelation structure, same pleasure of a show that commits fully to its own absurdity and keeps raising the stakes.

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Section 3

The Dark Suburban Drama Shows

Dead to Me
06

Dead to Me

2019–2022
★7.8IMDb
Jen is grieving her husband, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Judy is also grieving — something she's not specific about. They meet at a grief support group and become close friends. The thing Judy is not being specific about is connected to Jen's loss in a way that keeps expanding into new complications. Dead to Me is Desperate Housewives' comedic DNA transplanted into a show about grief, guilt, and the specific intimacy of female friendship. Christina Applegate gives one of the best comedy-drama performances of recent years.
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The White Lotus
07

The White Lotus

2021–present
★8.1IMDb
At a luxury resort — first in Hawaii, then Sicily, then Thailand — wealthy guests check in and the staff watches. Over the course of a week, tensions, secrets, and class resentments explode. Someone always dies; the question is who and why. Mike White's writing is perfectly calibrated between satire and genuine darkness. The observation of wealthy people behaving terribly in beautiful places, while the show is fully aware of the comedy in that, is exactly Desperate Housewives' mode.
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Nine Perfect Strangers
08

Nine Perfect Strangers

2021
★6.9IMDb
Nine people arrive at a remote wellness retreat called Tranquillum House, each carrying something they want fixed. The director, Masha, has unconventional ideas about what healing requires — specifically, pharmaceutical ones she hasn't mentioned to anyone. Based on Liane Moriarty's novel. Starts as dark comedy satire of wellness culture, shifts into genuine thriller. The cast (Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Regina Hall) goes to places they rarely visit.
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Doctor Foster
09

Doctor Foster

2015–2017
★8.2IMDb
Gemma Foster is a successful GP in a picturesque English town who begins suspecting her husband of having an affair. Her investigation reveals a deception far more comprehensive than she imagined — years deep, involving people she thought she knew. Two series of extraordinarily controlled psychological drama as Gemma responds to systematic betrayal with increasing ruthlessness. Smaller and colder than Desperate Housewives but the domestic betrayal DNA is identical.
Why it matters

What Desperate Housewives looks like with the camp removed and the psychological realism turned up. Essential.

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Liar
10

Liar

2017–2020
★7.4IMDb
A teacher and a surgeon go on a date and something terrible happens afterward — but the show's two seasons present radically incompatible accounts of what. One person is lying. The audience doesn't know who, and the show is built on that uncertainty. A British drama about the impossibility of knowing the truth in private spaces, and the way respectability protects the wrong people.
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Section 4

The Soapy Female Ensemble Shows

Gossip Girl
11

Gossip Girl

2007–2012
★7.4IMDb
The Upper East Side of Manhattan — old money, private schools, designer everything — has an anonymous blogger who knows everything happening on the social circuit and broadcasts it instantly. Blair Waldorf controls the hierarchy with intelligence and ruthlessness. Serena van der Woodsen is beautiful and chaotic in equal measure. Secrets are currency, reputation is survival, and no one is more dangerous than someone who knows exactly what you've done. The same social surveillance mechanics as Desperate Housewives, set in a teenage world.
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The Undoing
12

The Undoing

2020
★7.5IMDb
Grace Fraser is a successful therapist married to a charming doctor, living an enviable Park Avenue life. When a woman she barely knows is found murdered, her husband becomes the prime suspect. What follows is six episodes of Grace discovering how little she actually knew about the man she married — and how much she's constructed a life on what she chose to see. Nicole Kidman again. The finale's reveal is one of TV's great whiplashes.
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Pushing Daisies
13

Pushing Daisies

2007–2009
★8.3IMDb
A pie maker can bring the dead back to life with a single touch — but if he touches them a second time, they die permanently. He revives his childhood sweetheart this way, which means they can never touch each other again. He uses the ability to solve murders, briefly interviewing the victims before the clock runs out. The show looks like a fairy tale and runs as a murder mystery procedural, narrated by the same man who narrated Desperate Housewives. Cancelled criminally early.
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Ugly Betty
14

Ugly Betty

2006–2010
★7.6IMDb
Betty Suarez, unfashionable by any measure of the fashion world she enters, gets hired at Mode magazine in New York — a place that runs on cruelty and aesthetic judgment she is entirely immune to. Her boss Daniel Meade is supposed to fail; Betty is the mechanism his father chose to prevent that. Four seasons of a woman whose decency is her most subversive quality navigating a world that treats kindness as weakness.
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15

Aarya

2020–present
★7.8IMDb
Aarya Sareen's husband is shot at their daughter's birthday party. In the days after, she discovers her husband was running a criminal drug operation for a family syndicate — and that the people who killed him want their product back, with interest. To protect her children, Aarya has to take over. Sushmita Sen is absolutely extraordinary as a woman using intelligence and ferocity she didn't know she had. The show does what Desperate Housewives does — a woman navigating a world more dangerous than her domestic life suggested — in a Rajasthani criminal context that gives it a completely different flavor.
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Section 5

Quick Match Guide

| Want... | Watch | |---------|-------| | Same creator, same DNA | Why Women Kill, Devious Maids | | More prestige, same secrets | Big Little Lies | | Active revenge, not passive suffering | Revenge | | British domestic drama | Doctor Foster, Liar | | Darker satire | The White Lotus | | Teen version | Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl | | Indian version | Aarya | | Visually strange version | Pushing Daisies |

Section 6

Want More?

- [Full list: Shows Like Desperate Housewives](/shows/similar/desperate-housewives) — 20+ algorithmic matches - [Suburban drama shows](/shows/mood/suburban-drama) — perfect houses, imperfect lives - [Female ensemble shows](/shows/mood/female-ensemble) — women at the center - [Dark comedy shows](/shows/mood/dark-comedy) — laughing at the worst things - [What show should I watch?](/shows/discover) — random recommendation

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