'Desperate Housewives' finale; Series over after 8 years

There's no easy way to say goodbye to an old friend, but this parting seems especially bittersweet. Why is not immediately apparent because "Desperate Housewives" (whose two-hour finale airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on ABC/7) pretty much ran out of anything original to say after the first season, and started to recycle narrative hooks by the third. This final season, the eighth, is a thinly disguised rehash of "I Know What You Did Last Summer," but it's not entirely clear whether this is an homage or a heist.

Nevertheless, we certainly haven't always come to "Housewives" for originality all these years -- even though the show did briefly seem like one of the most original ideas on all of television when it blasted through 21 million TV screens way back on Oct. 3, 2004. We came out of love, and our love was often rewarded.

Created by an out-of-work journeyman show runner, then living with his mother, the idea for "Housewives" was the very stuff that TV dreams are made of. "At its core," Marc Cherry once told a reporter, "this show examines the choices we make in life and what happens when what you've chosen still does not make you happy." (At its core, that's the basis of "Mad Men," too, by the way.)

ABC -- still in recovery after the "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" overdose fiasco -- picked this up in the spirit of: "Hey, what've we got to lose!" But like "Lost" -- which bowed the same season -- "Housewives" would shortly help rescue the network and all of network TV from the clutches of waning cop procedurals and (especially) from reality shows, then flooding the airwaves.

"Wives" was a both mashup and very nearly a send-up of some of the oldest conventions of television -- the sitcom and prime time soap, dressed up in both familiar and unfamiliar ways. Wisteria Lane was the street you lived on, or where you knew someone, except that its "Leave-It-to-Beaver" perfection was so glaring, so overstated, that it instantly conveyed the sort of horror David Lynch or Stephen King would be perfectly comfortable with. There were secrets here -- dark secrets that lay beneath the shiny chrome of this place ("What Lies Beneath," a hit movie back in '00, was reflected the first season.)

"I spent the day as I spent every other day, quietly polishing the routine of my life, until it gleamed with perfection," the narrator, Mary Alice Young, explained in the opening moments. "That's why it was so astonishing when I decided to go to my hallway closet and retrieve a revolver that had never been used."

She then used it, becoming both ghost and guiding moral authority for an entire series in one abrupt instance. Viewers knew they had suddenly come across something entirely -- shockingly -- different.

But the characters themselves are what makes this farewell so hard. "Housewives" was filled with memorable nutjobs played by superb character actors. But the core group -- Susan Delfino (Teri Hatcher), Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman), Bree Van der Kamp (Marcia Cross) and Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria) -- were of course our favorite nutjobs. Desperate and funny, they were the rocks of Wisteria. Goodnight, sweet ladies. You will be missed most of all.