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If you've found yourself vaguely dissatisfied after sitting through an episode of Desperate Housewives this season, don't wrack your brain wondering if it's because creator Marc Cherry isn't writing nearly all of the episodes, delegating much of the creative duties to a staff not completely in tune with his finely developed sense of soap opera camp (the evil-Eva-Longoria-twin episode should arrive in six weeks). Cherry fervently denies that he's not paying enough attention to his overrated Nielsen monster, so the LAT goes looking for other answers:

The attachment of viewers to characters on TV creates different expectations for television audiences than it does for moviegoers, said Stuart Fischoff, a media psychologist at Cal State L.A.

"It's not so much what's going on that is the problem," Fischoff said. "It's the comparison to last year. If this was the first season, people wouldn't have a reference point, a cognitive map or emotional map to compare it to. But it's the second season, so you can say it's unfolding differently as last year and I don't like it. That's why you might be getting what appears to be premature frustration."

See? It's not the show that's screwed up, it's our cognitive map to the memories of when we were tricked into thinking that the show was good. We feel so much better now! Everyone should have a media psychologist on call to deal with the mental turbulence induced by phantom boredom with Bree's unbelievable relationship with the gay pharmacist.