The TV show Desperate Housewives knew disparate influences, from Andrea Yates to Douglas Sirk, but more than anything it’s the most mainstream distillation ever of the influence of Pedro Almodóvar, one of the handful of cinema masters on the planet. In a Financial Times piece by Raphael Abraham, the director acknowledges the drift of talent and vision to smaller screens. An excerpt: 

“Almodóvar came to prominence during ‘La Movida,’ the Madrid counterculture that, following Franco’s death in 1975, enthusiastically cast off the oppressive mantle of dictatorship and embraced hedonism alongside sexual and political liberation. With their colourful and brazen depictions of modern Spanish life, Almodóvar’s earliest films shocked audiences and critics alike.

This power to shock remains intact. In preparation for our meeting I made the mistake of watching Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls On the Heap (1980) on a laptop while riding the London Tube. Within the first 20 minutes of Almodóvar’s crudely shot debut feature there is a rape scene and an eye-popping encounter in which a young punk girl walks in on a knitting class and urinates on a masochistic Madrid housewife who purrs with delight. Already attracting disapproving looks from my fellow passengers, I only just managed to snap shut the laptop lid before she hoisted up her skirt.

Such extreme examples aside, the kind of domestic transgression with which Almodóvar made his name can today be found in mainstream US television series such as Desperate Housewives, Nurse Jackie and Breaking Bad. ‘I think at the moment in the US they’re producing TV that is much closer to reality than the cinema is,’ he says. ‘Breaking Bad is like early Scorsese, the most brutal, most acid television. And, over five series, every episode is a masterpiece of scriptwriting, direction and exaggeration — not that they exaggerate reality but that they’re dealing with a reality that is already very extreme. Breaking Bad, I think, is the culmination of American fictional TV.’

In this regard, he says, it is outstripping film.”