Devious Maids Season 3 Review

One episode was provided for reviewing purposes prior to broadcast.

Picking up seconds after last year’s wedding massacre cliffhanger, the third season of Devious Maids doesn’t waste any time in not only answering major questions from that finale, but in setting up the big mysteries of the new season as well.  There’s a lot that can be said about the show’s inherently cheesy dialogue, over-the-top twists, and blatant similarity to creator Marc Cherry’s other show about a group of woman dealing with not-so-idyllic problems in beautifully idyllic settings, and most of it surprisingly positive. Devious Maids has yet to reach the embarrassingly good heights of Desperate Housewives, but as a 13-hour slice of effervescent summer fun, you could do a whole lot worse.

The show deals with its use of a classic cliffhanger (who got shot?) by using the just-as-classic premiere device of a flash-forward. I’ll keep spoilers to an extreme minimum, but Devious Maids nimbly hurdles over any harsh trauma that surviving characters of the shooting went through in the four month interval, which would have no doubt dragged down its peppiness for weeks on end. Instead, we get jokes about the event within opening scenes, and the writers begin setting up each of the maids’ own individual story lines for season 3.

First off is Marisol (Ana Ortiz), basking in the limelight as the author of a now New York Times Bestseller, a book essentially chronicling the events of the first season leading to the clearing of her son’s name. Marisol, unlike seasons past, gets a bit of the backseat in the season 3 premiere, designated to navigating fancy book functions and attempting to live two separate lives as a successful author and friend to Rosie, Carmen and Zoila. Her role in the premiere is small, but Ortiz pops as usual.

Zoila may have the biggest problem on hand in the opening hour, dealing with hiding her pregnancy from the rest of the group and discovering the disconcerting truth about the baby’s father. Elsewhere, Rosie discovers Spencer has taken a new job in a certain low-budget, high-profit movie industry and Carmen is relegated yet again to pine over a guy she can’t have, in a house that isn’t hers. She’s a fun character, always ready at-the-bat with a vocal jab, but her character feels sickeningly cyclical.