All that crap with Meg got old fast. Even in the 1997 Back To The Cul-de-sac reunion they dredged that up again as the Mac/Karen story. Lee & Dobson chewed scenery as usual.

It felt good to have some actual male energy on the show and the thing was that I much prefer how men and women were written when interacting with one another in the 80s than whatever is considered modern day male and female interactions.

I liked that the show portrayed all the women with moments of strength and moments of struggle. I also loved that the show wrote the men as masculine and not in a toxic way that Dynasty did. This was a show about marriages in an upper middle class California town so it made sense to have equally strong male and female characters interacting with one another.

Unpopular opinion, but I loved the times when Karen and Paige would interact because you saw an unease from Karen over how to relate to Paige and you saw someone that didn't consider Karen to be the second coming of Christ like the other characters did. It was a dynamic that wasn't explored, but you didn't need to explore it because both actresses provided subtext in their scenes with one another (plus, Karen learned her lesson from how she treated Annie in the pilot also).

Also, the show not knowing how to write Laura seemed odd especially since she had her ex-husband Richard out and about that could have been bought back as conflict for Laura/Sumner in season 9 instead of killing Laura off... but when you have writers without much imagination, it wouldn't have occurred to them.