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First Lady, Laura Bush, speaking before the White House Correspondents Dinner this past weekend, elevated a highly popular nighttime television soap opera Desperate Housewives to another level of popularity, when she humorously referred to it in her remarks.

She said if those desperate housewives who make up the fictional make up of the neighborhood portrayed on Desperate Housewives think their desperate housewives.... well she really is a desperate housewife.

When you think about it, this hit television show offers many of the same creature comforts that its 1960's counterpart offered for its nighttime viewers in terms of Peyton Place. It was a way for its largely female audience to escape some of the trying family matters of the day, be it in a neighborhood in Brooklyn or a farm in Iowa, or an apartment in Chicago.

So is the show a statement of the times we are in or is it a reflection of what viewers want to take a relaxing viewing vacation from?

Peyton Place offered escape for the America of the 1960s, with the simmering of the Vietnam War which for many families who had loved ones either serving or preparing to be drafted. The assassination of President Kennedy, the heightened communist tensions in Eastern Europe made our daily life very insecure and uncertain. Americans felt a heightened awareness of a threat at home...remember the bomb shelters as well as an increasing assault on our values. In the mid sixties the new young adults were emerging and asking America to re-define just who we were. They lead protests and it often became front and center discussions at the dinner table every evening in homes across our nation.

Television was exposing with civil rights marches throughout the south, college protests on campuses, and in the homes across America...perhaps, just perhaps women could do more than cook, clean, bake and shop...and this type was a simmering discontent which was now moving from the back burner to the front burner in America. .

So as nightly television news exposed a darker underbelly of society's ills...America sought, and especially the keepers of the hearth and home, women, specifically mothers...were looking for a different type of nighttime viewing. It had to be something that could give them momentary respite.

Peyton Place emerged as that show and that answer women viewers were looking for. Its actors became instant celebrities. It was a show, which was talked about by mothers with other mothers over the back yard fence, or at the PTA meetings, or sometimes after church services. The show allowed viewers to escape into this fictional world where imaginary high drama, deceit, failed marriages, illicit affairs, and conniving backstabbers could elicit the sort of quiet viewing pleasure that its viewers sought and felt. The audience somehow identified emotionally with the weekly justice meted out to the characters, which were being allowed to morph into in their minds.

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