China Gets "Desperate"

Only time will tell if the ladies of Wisteria Lane get lost in translation.

Desperate Housewives is set to hit the notoriously conservative Chinese airwaves for the first time Dec. 19, it was announced Thursday.

"It's a privilege to bring the award-winning Desperate Housewives to the great people of China," Laurie Younger, president of Buena Vista Worldwide Television--which produces the ABC hit--said in a statement. "The series' addictive blend of dark comedy and gripping drama is sure to thrill audiences in China the same way it does in 202 other territories around the world."

The ratings juggernaut will be dubbed into Mandarin and shown on the state-run Chinese network CCTV8 with no slow roll-out: The station will air three back-to-back episodes per night, with the entire first season screened over the course of a week.

The airwave inundation is designed to catch viewers up quickly on the goings-on of the hijinks-prone suburbanites--at least the viewers who haven't already seen the show via other, illegal means. Pirated DVD versions of the prime-time soap hit the streets of China almost as soon as the show premiered in the U.S. last year.

But still, the distributors have high hopes for the series' latest overseas debut, and for good reason. Desperate Housewives ranks as the top-rated program in Australia, New Zealand, Italy, the U.K., Singapore, South Africa and Germany. In the U.S., Housewives averages 24.9 million viewers a week, second only to CBS' CSI.

"Desperate Housewives has been breaking records around the world and we are sure it will be a hit with Chinese viewers," said Steve Macallister, senior vice president and managing director of Buena Vista International.

The Chinese government has become a bit more lax in allowing Western shows with racy themes onto the airwaves. In 2003, Beijing Television introduced its version of Sex and the City, called Pink Ladies. But the series, which had an all-Chinese cast and was not nearly as titillating as the HBO hit, failed to catch on.

The China market, with its population of 1.3 billion, is seen as key to Hollywood. Earlier this year, Donald Trump announced he was exporting The Apprentice to China.

As for Housewives, China is just the latest market producers are targeting.

The Marc Cherry creation is one of four ABC shows that are simultaneously dubbed in Spanish--Lost, Freddie and The George Lopez Show being the others--while the rest of the network's prime-time lineup just gets foreign-language subtitles.

Stephen MacPherson, ABC's president of entertainment, kicked off the bilingual dubbing last summer.

"I was tired of watching the Spanish-speaking audience slip through the cracks," he told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.

But the experiment hasn't always been a smooth one.

Last October, a technical glitch inadvertently caused a Southern California cable company to transmit the Spanish-language simulcast of the Sunday night hit to nearly 200,000 confused viewers. The episode aired for 50 minutes before the problem was fixed.

ABC replayed the episode in its English entirety later that week.

More good news for the Housewives: They're global gals in more ways than one. Earlier this week, the show garnered a five Golden Globe nominations, the most for any TV program. It's up for Best Comedy Series and all four leading ladies will compete in the Best Actress category when the ceremony airs Jan. 16.