Sheridan ascends throne as queen of nighttime soaps
Heather Locklear has long been hailed as the preeminent blond nighttime-soap diva. The honor, of course, is based on her essential work on ''Melrose Place," that most seminal of swimming-pool melodramas set in LA. And, indeed, not every TV actress can bring so very many shadings to pure expressionlessness. When Locklear segues from pushy-vapid to pouty-vapid to sexy-vapid, using only slight shifts of her poker face, she's simply in a league of her own.
But, with the season finale of ''Desperate Housewives" on Sunday night at 9 on Channel 5, it's time to right a serious global injustice. Because despite Locklear's formidable talents, Nicollette Sheridan is the true modern queen of the prime-time serial. She is the goddess of the catty sashay, the high priestess of low-down scheming, a fierce actress who plays fierce women who play fierce games to get what they want. From her formative days as Paige on ''Knots Landing" to her current turn as Edie Britt on ''Housewives," Sheridan has more than proven she can sling soap-operatic attitude with the best of them -- yes, friends, even Donna Mills. Right now, she's TV's most transfixin' vixen.
Sheridan's dish factor was clear on ''Knots Landing," particularly during Paige's love affair with older man Greg Sumner. Not only did Paige play a mean game of strip croquet, but Sheridan more than held her own against the Jack Nicholsonian stylings of William Devane. However, she has fully blossomed on ''Desperate Housewives," as she effortlessly chews up the show's other residents and spits them out. Wearing her cleavage like a steel breastplate for battle as she strides along Wisteria Lane, she's all alpha.
Frequently on ''Housewives," Edie takes on Teri Hatcher's Susan, who has the man Edie wants. And each time they face off, Sheridan makes it hard not to root for Edie, despite her moral inferiority. That's the sign of a great soap diva -- you like her character best of all when she's at her most manipulative and dominant. And Sheridan makes Edie's disdain for the fickle Susan fundamental to the show, a sort of systemic guard against excessive cutesiness. Not surprisingly, the writers appear to love Sheridan, as they hand her many of the show's hottest lines -- ''This is the worst intervention I've ever been to," she exclaimed last week.
Strangely, while she steals ''Housewives" on a regular basis, Sheridan has not been granted official featured status. She's not pictured under the apple tree with the other women in the opening credits, and when a magazine such as Vanity Fair profiles the cast it generally relegates her to the background, with a nod to her Towelgate incident on ''Monday Night Football." Hatcher is portrayed as the beloved Comeback Kid, Felicity Huffman is the Actress who's done Mamet, Eva Longoria is the Sex Kitten, and Marcia Cross is the Cool Intellectual or the Hot Psychopath, depending on whom you read. But few zero in on the real Comeback Kid, Sheridan, whose career is thriving once again after a long stretch of plastic TV movies.
And of all the ''Desperate" ladies, Sheridan is the only one who is diva enough to truly deserve a drag queen of her very own. With her exaggerated lips, her hard eyes, and her Mae West haughtiness, she's ripe for the sort of ironic and iconic worship every great soap villainess merits. Where is the Greenwich Village performer who's man enough to step up to this B-grade fashion plate?
By the way, there's no big feminist spin to Sheridan's magic as Edie, no particular way that she's revolutionizing the image of slutty women who, as Mary Alice noted on ''Housewives" last week, need attention from men to feel good about themselves. If she offers any role modeling whatsoever, it's in the way she portrays a confident working woman. While the other housewives are dependent on and reactive to the men in their lives, she's a force of independence and ego, the polar opposite of Susan. She's as in charge of her real-estate deals as she is of her flirtations. She does use her enhanced beauty as a weapon, but she derives her true power from her canniness.
OK, so Sheridan's no Edie Falco, and there's probably no Emmy in her future. Her range doesn't much exceed the limited needs of fluff melodramas like ''Knots Landing" and ''Desperate Housewives," which may well have her wrestling in a pool of mud with another housewife before all is said and done. Still, Sheridan is enormous fun to watch as an aging hottie dripping with hauteur. Hard as it may be for Locklear loyalists to imagine, she is soap's real nighttime savior.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.
