🕷️ Crawler Inspector

URL Lookup

Direct Parameter Lookup

Raw Queries and Responses

1. Shard Calculation

Query:

Response:

Calculated Shard: 115 (from laksa184)

2. Crawled Status Check

Query:

curl -X POST \
  'http://laksa115.int.ahrefs:8124/' \
  -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
  -H 'X-ClickHouse-Database: crawler3' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic YXBpOg==' \
  -d 'SELECT getAhrefsURLFromUnparsed(src_unparsed) AS found_url, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(download_stamp), 0) AS crawl_time, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(props_url_first_seen), 0) AS first_indexed_time, download_http_code AS http_code, src_unparsed AS src_unparsed, src_root_hash AS src_root_hash, history_drop_reason AS history_drop_reason, meta_title AS meta_title, meta_descriptions AS meta_descriptions, attrs_boilerpipe_text AS attrs_boilerpipe_text, attrs_markdown AS attrs_markdown, attrs_readable_markdown AS attrs_readable_markdown, meta_canonical AS meta_canonical FROM crawler3.page_info_local FINAL PREWHERE (src_root_hash, src_unparsed) IN ((getAhrefsRootHashFromUnparsed(getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://variety.com/2019/tv/reviews/why-women-kill-review-1203294108/\')), getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://variety.com/2019/tv/reviews/why-women-kill-review-1203294108/\'))) FORMAT JSONEachRow'

Response:

{"found_url":"https:\/\/variety.com\/2019\/tv\/reviews\/why-women-kill-review-1203294108\/","crawl_time":1775485574,"first_indexed_time":1565216036,"http_code":200,"src_unparsed":"com,variety!\/2019\/tv\/reviews\/why-women-kill-review-1203294108\/ s443","src_root_hash":"6137995448256228915","history_drop_reason":null,"meta_title":"TV Review: 'Why Women Kill' on CBS All Access","meta_descriptions":["\"Why Women Kill\" is an unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes whose leaps between storylines leaves actors stranded."],"attrs_boilerpipe_text":"Home\nTV\nReviews\nTV Review: ‘Why Women Kill’\n\"Why Women Kill\" is an unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes whose leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded.\nCBS\nThe best moments of “Desperate Housewives” — Marc Cherry’s pathbreaking and strangely underrated 2000s soap opera — were the ones in which the wives got to talking. The four main characters on the show, which came on the air shortly after the end of “Sex and the City” and transplanted aspects of its formula from Manhattan to anonymous suburbia, each represented a particular way of thinking about love, marriage, and the home. The murders and scandal that made the show’s name felt ornamental when debate and frank talk played out over hedges or at the ladies’ poker night.\nWhich makes it all the more confounding that Cherry’s new soap opera, the CBS All Access drama “\nWhy Women Kill\n,” is yet the latest show to fail to learn the lessons of one of the last truly huge network hits. His three protagonists — played by\nLucy Liu\n, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste — exist in different timelines, each coping with a collapsing marriage and seeming to move closer to homicide with each slight. That isolation may be part of the show’s point: that these women are driven over the edge by the lack of camaraderie in their lives, a condition that recurs through the decades. But it makes for a deeply unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes, a show whose skittish leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded.\nThe least successful of the show’s three strands is the one that’s most in line with the goofy excess for which Cherry is best known. Liu’s character exists in a “Dynasty”-style 1980s, clothed in neon synthetic fabrics and trapped in a marriage in which wealth stands in for love and for fidelity. Liu vamps through the role unconvincingly. She’s too good at being tough to credibly fall apart the way the show demands, and forces her voice into reediness as a stand-in for a manically collapsing vulnerability she can’t sell.\nCherry has walked this path before, with Bree on “Desperate Housewives” — an exaggerated caricature of femininity and materialism. But Marcia Cross’s performance was richly layered, and Cross was given access to co-stars on her level. Liu, for all she is badly miscast, still devours her scenes by force of star power; she may not convince you of what she’s going through, but there’s little else worth focusing on, no true friend or potential swain on her particular level. Similarly, Ginnifer Goodwin dominates a story of a cheated-on housewife in the 1960s, adding her familiar warmth and naivete to a tale so reliant on archetypes that it practically tells itself. Goodwin has devoted her life to a man whose greatness as a provider turns out illusory; she gets mad, then, as the cliché goes, prepares to get even.\nBoth Liu’s and Goodwin’s stories, given a short amount of time and one real character apiece, lean hard on collective memory of their eras, as if the fact that a generic story of unfaithfulness in marriage can be enlivened because its protagonist is dressed like June Cleaver or like Alexis Carrington. At least, in the present-day storyline, such shorthand isn’t easily available, though the show can hardly be said to be straining in the story it tells here. A lascivious Reid Scott aims for a threesome between his wife (Howell-Baptiste) and her girlfriend (Alexandra Daddario, to whom I am not related). They may not be in costumes designed to evoke the late 2010s the way Goodwin’s and Liu’s are of their historical moments, but both Howell-Baptiste’s and Daddario’s characters existing solely as extensions of a man’s libido feels, unfortunately, as contemporary as it gets.\nThe lasting impact of “Desperate Housewives” remains — strangely — the use of “housewife” as a synonym for any woman on the unkillable “Real Housewives” franchise. Few shows have time or energy for the humane curiosity of Cherry’s breakout show, a drama-comedy hybrid that was content to spend scenes allowing characters to show us who they were in their reactions to big crises and to very small ones, too — and then to debrief among friends and frenemies. In spending time only at the moments of highest tension in its three protagonists’ lives, “Why Women Kill” leaches them of anything other than their ability to create drama. We’ll surely eventually find out precisely why they kill. We may never learn how it is they live, or what they live for.\n“Why Women Kill.” CBS All Access. August 15. (Two episodes screened for review).\nCast: Lucy Liu, Ginnifer Goodwin, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Jack Davenport, Sam Jaeger, Reid Scott, Alexandra Daddario, Sadie Calvano, Leo Howard, Alicia Coppola, and Katie Finneran.\nExecutive Producers: Marc Cherry, Brian Grazer, Francie Calfo, Michael Hanel, Mindy Schultheis, and Marc Webb\nMore from Variety","attrs_markdown":"![an image, when javascript is unavailable](https:\/\/sb.scorecardresearch.com\/p?c1=2&c2=6035310&c4=&cv=3.9&cj=1)\n\n- [Plus Icon Film](https:\/\/variety.com\/v\/film\/)\n- [Plus Icon TV](https:\/\/variety.com\/v\/tv\/)\n- [Plus Icon What To Watch](https:\/\/variety.com\/what-to-watch-streaming-movies-shows-online\/)\n- [Plus Icon Music](https:\/\/variety.com\/v\/music\/)\n- [Plus Icon Docs](https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/documentaries-to-watch\/)\n- [Plus Icon Digital & Gaming](https:\/\/variety.com\/v\/digital\/)\n- [Plus Icon Global](https:\/\/variety.com\/c\/global\/)\n- [Plus Icon Awards Circuit](https:\/\/variety.com\/e\/contenders\/)\n- [Plus Icon Video](https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@variety\/videos)\n- [Plus Icon What To Hear](https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/what-to-hear\/)\n\nPlus Icon\n\nClick to expand the Mega Menu\n\nPlus Icon\n\nClick to Expand Search Input\n\n- [Got a Tip?](https:\/\/variety.com\/tips)\n- [Newsletters](https:\/\/cloud.email.variety.com\/signup\/)\n\n[Switch edition between U.S. Edition Asia Edition Global Edition](https:\/\/variety.com\/2019\/tv\/reviews\/why-women-kill-review-1203294108\/)\n\n- [U.S.](https:\/\/variety.com\/)\n- [Asia](https:\/\/variety.com\/c\/asia\/)\n- [Global](https:\/\/variety.com\/c\/global\/)\n\n[Variety](https:\/\/variety.com\/)\n\nPlus Icon\n\nClick to expand the Mega Menu\n\nPlus Icon\n\nClick to Expand Search Input\n\n[Variety](https:\/\/variety.com\/)\n\n[Plus Icon Read Next: ‘Real Housewives of Rhode Island’: Ashley Iaconetti On Her Return to Reality TV and Why Taylor Frankie Paul Should Never Have Been the ‘Bachelorette’](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/tv\/news\/ashley-iaconetti-real-housewives-rhode-island-bachelor-1236705948\/)\n\n1. [Home](https:\/\/variety.com\/)\n2. [TV](https:\/\/variety.com\/v\/tv\/)\n3. [Reviews](https:\/\/variety.com\/c\/reviews\/)\n\nAug 8, 2019 8:35am PT\n# TV Review: ‘Why Women Kill’\n\"Why Women Kill\" is an unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes whose leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded.\n\nBy  [Daniel D'Addario](https:\/\/variety.com\/author\/daniel-daddario\/)\n\nPlus Icon\n\n### [Daniel D'Addario](https:\/\/variety.com\/author\/daniel-daddario\/)\nChief TV Critic\n\n[DPD\\_](https:\/\/twitter.com\/DPD_)\n\n- [‘Hannah Montana’ 20th-Anniversary Special Proves Miley Cyrus Survived Disney Channel Stardom — and Prevailed](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/tv\/columns\/miley-cyrus-hannah-montana-anniversary-disney-child-star-1236702780\/)\n  7 days ago\n- [‘Love Story’ Gives John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy a Wrenching, Wistful Sendoff](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/tv\/news\/love-story-finale-jfk-jr-carolyn-plane-crash-deaths-1236701278\/)\n  1 week ago\n- [‘Giant’ Broadway Review: John Lithgow as a Venomous Roald Dahl Animates a Staggering Production](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/legit\/reviews\/giant-broadway-review-john-lithgow-roald-dahl-1236696703\/)\n  2 weeks ago\n\n[See All](https:\/\/variety.com\/author\/daniel-daddario\/)\n\n![\"Murder Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry\" -- Ep\\#101 -- Pictured (l-r): Jack Davenport as Karl; Lucy Liu as Simone of the CBS All Access series WHY WOMEN KILL. Photo Cr: Ali Goldstein\/CBS ©2019 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.](https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/115138_1230b.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1)\n\nCBS\n\nThe best moments of “Desperate Housewives” — Marc Cherry’s pathbreaking and strangely underrated 2000s soap opera — were the ones in which the wives got to talking. The four main characters on the show, which came on the air shortly after the end of “Sex and the City” and transplanted aspects of its formula from Manhattan to anonymous suburbia, each represented a particular way of thinking about love, marriage, and the home. The murders and scandal that made the show’s name felt ornamental when debate and frank talk played out over hedges or at the ladies’ poker night.\n\n## Related Stories\n[![Eye Haïdara ](https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/0-25-e1774446891976.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/film\/global\/eye-haidara-cannes-film-festival-opening-closing-ceremonies-1236698888\/)\n\n### [Eye Haïdara to Host Cannes Film Festival's Opening and Closing Ceremonies](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/film\/global\/eye-haidara-cannes-film-festival-opening-closing-ceremonies-1236698888\/)\n\n[![Thierry Fremaux ](https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Collage-Maker-27-Mar-2023-07-43-PM-6555.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/film\/global\/cannes-chief-thierry-fremaux-2026-lineup-hollywood-films-1236697525\/)\n\n### [Cannes Chief Thierry Frémaux on Hollywood Cutbacks, Festival Politics and Industry Upheaval: 'Our Mission Is Very Simple — to Define What Cinema Will Be in 2026' (EXCLUSIVE)](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/film\/global\/cannes-chief-thierry-fremaux-2026-lineup-hollywood-films-1236697525\/)\n\nWhich makes it all the more confounding that Cherry’s new soap opera, the CBS All Access drama “[Why Women Kill](https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/why-women-kill\/),” is yet the latest show to fail to learn the lessons of one of the last truly huge network hits. His three protagonists — played by [Lucy Liu](https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/lucy-liu\/), Ginnifer Goodwin, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste — exist in different timelines, each coping with a collapsing marriage and seeming to move closer to homicide with each slight. That isolation may be part of the show’s point: that these women are driven over the edge by the lack of camaraderie in their lives, a condition that recurs through the decades. But it makes for a deeply unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes, a show whose skittish leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded.\n\n### Popular on Variety\nThe least successful of the show’s three strands is the one that’s most in line with the goofy excess for which Cherry is best known. Liu’s character exists in a “Dynasty”-style 1980s, clothed in neon synthetic fabrics and trapped in a marriage in which wealth stands in for love and for fidelity. Liu vamps through the role unconvincingly. She’s too good at being tough to credibly fall apart the way the show demands, and forces her voice into reediness as a stand-in for a manically collapsing vulnerability she can’t sell.\n\nCherry has walked this path before, with Bree on “Desperate Housewives” — an exaggerated caricature of femininity and materialism. But Marcia Cross’s performance was richly layered, and Cross was given access to co-stars on her level. Liu, for all she is badly miscast, still devours her scenes by force of star power; she may not convince you of what she’s going through, but there’s little else worth focusing on, no true friend or potential swain on her particular level. Similarly, Ginnifer Goodwin dominates a story of a cheated-on housewife in the 1960s, adding her familiar warmth and naivete to a tale so reliant on archetypes that it practically tells itself. Goodwin has devoted her life to a man whose greatness as a provider turns out illusory; she gets mad, then, as the cliché goes, prepares to get even.\n\nBoth Liu’s and Goodwin’s stories, given a short amount of time and one real character apiece, lean hard on collective memory of their eras, as if the fact that a generic story of unfaithfulness in marriage can be enlivened because its protagonist is dressed like June Cleaver or like Alexis Carrington. At least, in the present-day storyline, such shorthand isn’t easily available, though the show can hardly be said to be straining in the story it tells here. A lascivious Reid Scott aims for a threesome between his wife (Howell-Baptiste) and her girlfriend (Alexandra Daddario, to whom I am not related). They may not be in costumes designed to evoke the late 2010s the way Goodwin’s and Liu’s are of their historical moments, but both Howell-Baptiste’s and Daddario’s characters existing solely as extensions of a man’s libido feels, unfortunately, as contemporary as it gets.\n\nThe lasting impact of “Desperate Housewives” remains — strangely — the use of “housewife” as a synonym for any woman on the unkillable “Real Housewives” franchise. Few shows have time or energy for the humane curiosity of Cherry’s breakout show, a drama-comedy hybrid that was content to spend scenes allowing characters to show us who they were in their reactions to big crises and to very small ones, too — and then to debrief among friends and frenemies. In spending time only at the moments of highest tension in its three protagonists’ lives, “Why Women Kill” leaches them of anything other than their ability to create drama. We’ll surely eventually find out precisely why they kill. We may never learn how it is they live, or what they live for.\n\n“Why Women Kill.” CBS All Access. August 15. (Two episodes screened for review).\n\nCast: Lucy Liu, Ginnifer Goodwin, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Jack Davenport, Sam Jaeger, Reid Scott, Alexandra Daddario, Sadie Calvano, Leo Howard, Alicia Coppola, and Katie Finneran.\n\nExecutive Producers: Marc Cherry, Brian Grazer, Francie Calfo, Michael Hanel, Mindy Schultheis, and Marc Webb\n\n#### Read More About:\n- [Lucy Liu,](https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/lucy-liu\/)\n- [Why Women Kill](https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/why-women-kill\/)\n\n[Jump to Comments](https:\/\/variety.com\/2019\/tv\/reviews\/why-women-kill-review-1203294108\/#article-comments)\n\n## More from Variety\n- [![Young Miko](https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Credit_-Joshua-Rivera-@shotsjpg-Press-Pic-e1775479005306.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/music\/news\/young-miko-late-checkout-tour-dates-1236709236\/)\n  \n  ### [Young Miko Announces ‘Late Checkout’ Tour — 31 Dates, 11 Countries (EXCLUSIVE)](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/music\/news\/young-miko-late-checkout-tour-dates-1236709236\/)\n\nJavaScript is required to load the comments.\n\nLoading comments...\n\n## Most Popular\n- ### ['Malcolm In The Middle' Star Erik Per Sullivan Turned Down ‘Buckets Of Money’ to Return as Dewey in Series Revival, Says Jane Kaczmarek](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/tv\/news\/malcolm-in-the-middle-revival-erik-per-sullivan-money-1236708796\/)\n  [![malcolm in the middle erik per sullivan](https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/erik-per-sullivan-malcolm.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/tv\/news\/malcolm-in-the-middle-revival-erik-per-sullivan-money-1236708796\/)\n- ### ['Shrinking' Creator Bill Lawrence Says Season 4 Will Have ‘A New Story With The Same Cast’](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/tv\/news\/shrinking-bill-lawrence-season-4-new-story-harrison-ford-1236708489\/)\n  [![Shrinking](https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Shrinking_Photo_021001.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/tv\/news\/shrinking-bill-lawrence-season-4-new-story-harrison-ford-1236708489\/)\n- ### [Savannah Guthrie Shares Emotional Easter Message Amid Her Mom’s Disappearance: ‘I Have Questioned Whether Jesus Really Ever Experienced This…](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/tv\/news\/savannah-guthrie-easter-mom-disappearance-questioned-jesus-1236708959\/)\n  [![Savannah Guthrie](https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/MixCollage-05-Apr-2026-12-50-PM-1795.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/tv\/news\/savannah-guthrie-easter-mom-disappearance-questioned-jesus-1236708959\/)\n- ### [Ranveer Singh’s ‘Dhurandhar: The Revenge’ Crosses \\$174 Million Globally, Becomes First Indian Film to Top \\$25 Million in North…](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/film\/box-office\/ranveer-singh-dhurandhar-the-revenge-174-million-globally-1236709179\/)\n  [![Dhurandhar The Revenge](https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Dhurandhar-The-Revenge.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/film\/box-office\/ranveer-singh-dhurandhar-the-revenge-174-million-globally-1236709179\/)\n- ### ['Real Housewives of Rhode Island': Ashley Iaconetti On Her Return to Reality TV and Why Taylor Frankie Paul Should Never Have Been the ‘Bachelorette…](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/tv\/news\/ashley-iaconetti-real-housewives-rhode-island-bachelor-1236705948\/)\n  [![NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 07: Ashley Iaconetti attends A24's \"Materialists\" premiere at DGA Theater on June 07, 2025 in New York City. 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[Home](https:\/\/variety.com\/)\n2. [TV](https:\/\/variety.com\/v\/tv\/)\n3. [Reviews](https:\/\/variety.com\/c\/reviews\/)\n## TV Review: ‘Why Women Kill’\n\"Why Women Kill\" is an unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes whose leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded.\n\n![\"Murder Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry\" -- Ep\\#101 -- Pictured (l-r): Jack Davenport as Karl; Lucy Liu as Simone of the CBS All Access series WHY WOMEN KILL. Photo Cr: Ali Goldstein\/CBS ©2019 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.](https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/115138_1230b.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1)\n\nCBS\n\nThe best moments of “Desperate Housewives” — Marc Cherry’s pathbreaking and strangely underrated 2000s soap opera — were the ones in which the wives got to talking. The four main characters on the show, which came on the air shortly after the end of “Sex and the City” and transplanted aspects of its formula from Manhattan to anonymous suburbia, each represented a particular way of thinking about love, marriage, and the home. The murders and scandal that made the show’s name felt ornamental when debate and frank talk played out over hedges or at the ladies’ poker night.\n\nWhich makes it all the more confounding that Cherry’s new soap opera, the CBS All Access drama “[Why Women Kill](https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/why-women-kill\/),” is yet the latest show to fail to learn the lessons of one of the last truly huge network hits. His three protagonists — played by [Lucy Liu](https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/lucy-liu\/), Ginnifer Goodwin, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste — exist in different timelines, each coping with a collapsing marriage and seeming to move closer to homicide with each slight. That isolation may be part of the show’s point: that these women are driven over the edge by the lack of camaraderie in their lives, a condition that recurs through the decades. But it makes for a deeply unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes, a show whose skittish leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded.\n\nThe least successful of the show’s three strands is the one that’s most in line with the goofy excess for which Cherry is best known. Liu’s character exists in a “Dynasty”-style 1980s, clothed in neon synthetic fabrics and trapped in a marriage in which wealth stands in for love and for fidelity. Liu vamps through the role unconvincingly. She’s too good at being tough to credibly fall apart the way the show demands, and forces her voice into reediness as a stand-in for a manically collapsing vulnerability she can’t sell.\n\nCherry has walked this path before, with Bree on “Desperate Housewives” — an exaggerated caricature of femininity and materialism. But Marcia Cross’s performance was richly layered, and Cross was given access to co-stars on her level. Liu, for all she is badly miscast, still devours her scenes by force of star power; she may not convince you of what she’s going through, but there’s little else worth focusing on, no true friend or potential swain on her particular level. Similarly, Ginnifer Goodwin dominates a story of a cheated-on housewife in the 1960s, adding her familiar warmth and naivete to a tale so reliant on archetypes that it practically tells itself. Goodwin has devoted her life to a man whose greatness as a provider turns out illusory; she gets mad, then, as the cliché goes, prepares to get even.\n\nBoth Liu’s and Goodwin’s stories, given a short amount of time and one real character apiece, lean hard on collective memory of their eras, as if the fact that a generic story of unfaithfulness in marriage can be enlivened because its protagonist is dressed like June Cleaver or like Alexis Carrington. At least, in the present-day storyline, such shorthand isn’t easily available, though the show can hardly be said to be straining in the story it tells here. A lascivious Reid Scott aims for a threesome between his wife (Howell-Baptiste) and her girlfriend (Alexandra Daddario, to whom I am not related). They may not be in costumes designed to evoke the late 2010s the way Goodwin’s and Liu’s are of their historical moments, but both Howell-Baptiste’s and Daddario’s characters existing solely as extensions of a man’s libido feels, unfortunately, as contemporary as it gets.\n\nThe lasting impact of “Desperate Housewives” remains — strangely — the use of “housewife” as a synonym for any woman on the unkillable “Real Housewives” franchise. Few shows have time or energy for the humane curiosity of Cherry’s breakout show, a drama-comedy hybrid that was content to spend scenes allowing characters to show us who they were in their reactions to big crises and to very small ones, too — and then to debrief among friends and frenemies. In spending time only at the moments of highest tension in its three protagonists’ lives, “Why Women Kill” leaches them of anything other than their ability to create drama. We’ll surely eventually find out precisely why they kill. We may never learn how it is they live, or what they live for.\n\n“Why Women Kill.” CBS All Access. August 15. (Two episodes screened for review).\n\nCast: Lucy Liu, Ginnifer Goodwin, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Jack Davenport, Sam Jaeger, Reid Scott, Alexandra Daddario, Sadie Calvano, Leo Howard, Alicia Coppola, and Katie Finneran.\n\nExecutive Producers: Marc Cherry, Brian Grazer, Francie Calfo, Michael Hanel, Mindy Schultheis, and Marc Webb\n\n## More from Variety\n- [![Young Miko](https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Credit_-Joshua-Rivera-@shotsjpg-Press-Pic-e1775479005306.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https:\/\/variety.com\/2026\/music\/news\/young-miko-late-checkout-tour-dates-1236709236\/)\n\n![](https:\/\/px.ads.linkedin.com\/collect\/?pid=1429113&fmt=gif)","meta_canonical":null}

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Meta Description	"Why Women Kill" is an unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes whose leaps between storylines leaves actors stranded.
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Boilerpipe Text	Home TV Reviews TV Review: ‘Why Women Kill’ "Why Women Kill" is an unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes whose leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded. CBS The best moments of “Desperate Housewives” — Marc Cherry’s pathbreaking and strangely underrated 2000s soap opera — were the ones in which the wives got to talking. The four main characters on the show, which came on the air shortly after the end of “Sex and the City” and transplanted aspects of its formula from Manhattan to anonymous suburbia, each represented a particular way of thinking about love, marriage, and the home. The murders and scandal that made the show’s name felt ornamental when debate and frank talk played out over hedges or at the ladies’ poker night. Which makes it all the more confounding that Cherry’s new soap opera, the CBS All Access drama “ Why Women Kill ,” is yet the latest show to fail to learn the lessons of one of the last truly huge network hits. His three protagonists — played by Lucy Liu , Ginnifer Goodwin, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste — exist in different timelines, each coping with a collapsing marriage and seeming to move closer to homicide with each slight. That isolation may be part of the show’s point: that these women are driven over the edge by the lack of camaraderie in their lives, a condition that recurs through the decades. But it makes for a deeply unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes, a show whose skittish leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded. The least successful of the show’s three strands is the one that’s most in line with the goofy excess for which Cherry is best known. Liu’s character exists in a “Dynasty”-style 1980s, clothed in neon synthetic fabrics and trapped in a marriage in which wealth stands in for love and for fidelity. Liu vamps through the role unconvincingly. She’s too good at being tough to credibly fall apart the way the show demands, and forces her voice into reediness as a stand-in for a manically collapsing vulnerability she can’t sell. Cherry has walked this path before, with Bree on “Desperate Housewives” — an exaggerated caricature of femininity and materialism. But Marcia Cross’s performance was richly layered, and Cross was given access to co-stars on her level. Liu, for all she is badly miscast, still devours her scenes by force of star power; she may not convince you of what she’s going through, but there’s little else worth focusing on, no true friend or potential swain on her particular level. Similarly, Ginnifer Goodwin dominates a story of a cheated-on housewife in the 1960s, adding her familiar warmth and naivete to a tale so reliant on archetypes that it practically tells itself. Goodwin has devoted her life to a man whose greatness as a provider turns out illusory; she gets mad, then, as the cliché goes, prepares to get even. Both Liu’s and Goodwin’s stories, given a short amount of time and one real character apiece, lean hard on collective memory of their eras, as if the fact that a generic story of unfaithfulness in marriage can be enlivened because its protagonist is dressed like June Cleaver or like Alexis Carrington. At least, in the present-day storyline, such shorthand isn’t easily available, though the show can hardly be said to be straining in the story it tells here. A lascivious Reid Scott aims for a threesome between his wife (Howell-Baptiste) and her girlfriend (Alexandra Daddario, to whom I am not related). They may not be in costumes designed to evoke the late 2010s the way Goodwin’s and Liu’s are of their historical moments, but both Howell-Baptiste’s and Daddario’s characters existing solely as extensions of a man’s libido feels, unfortunately, as contemporary as it gets. The lasting impact of “Desperate Housewives” remains — strangely — the use of “housewife” as a synonym for any woman on the unkillable “Real Housewives” franchise. Few shows have time or energy for the humane curiosity of Cherry’s breakout show, a drama-comedy hybrid that was content to spend scenes allowing characters to show us who they were in their reactions to big crises and to very small ones, too — and then to debrief among friends and frenemies. In spending time only at the moments of highest tension in its three protagonists’ lives, “Why Women Kill” leaches them of anything other than their ability to create drama. We’ll surely eventually find out precisely why they kill. We may never learn how it is they live, or what they live for. “Why Women Kill.” CBS All Access. August 15. (Two episodes screened for review). Cast: Lucy Liu, Ginnifer Goodwin, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Jack Davenport, Sam Jaeger, Reid Scott, Alexandra Daddario, Sadie Calvano, Leo Howard, Alicia Coppola, and Katie Finneran. Executive Producers: Marc Cherry, Brian Grazer, Francie Calfo, Michael Hanel, Mindy Schultheis, and Marc Webb More from Variety
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[Home](https://variety.com/) 2. [TV](https://variety.com/v/tv/) 3. [Reviews](https://variety.com/c/reviews/) Aug 8, 2019 8:35am PT # TV Review: ‘Why Women Kill’ "Why Women Kill" is an unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes whose leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded. By [Daniel D'Addario](https://variety.com/author/daniel-daddario/) Plus Icon ### [Daniel D'Addario](https://variety.com/author/daniel-daddario/) Chief TV Critic [DPD\_](https://twitter.com/DPD_) - [‘Hannah Montana’ 20th-Anniversary Special Proves Miley Cyrus Survived Disney Channel Stardom — and Prevailed](https://variety.com/2026/tv/columns/miley-cyrus-hannah-montana-anniversary-disney-child-star-1236702780/) 7 days ago - [‘Love Story’ Gives John F. 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The four main characters on the show, which came on the air shortly after the end of “Sex and the City” and transplanted aspects of its formula from Manhattan to anonymous suburbia, each represented a particular way of thinking about love, marriage, and the home. The murders and scandal that made the show’s name felt ornamental when debate and frank talk played out over hedges or at the ladies’ poker night. ## Related Stories [![Eye Haïdara ](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/0-25-e1774446891976.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https://variety.com/2026/film/global/eye-haidara-cannes-film-festival-opening-closing-ceremonies-1236698888/) ### [Eye Haïdara to Host Cannes Film Festival's Opening and Closing Ceremonies](https://variety.com/2026/film/global/eye-haidara-cannes-film-festival-opening-closing-ceremonies-1236698888/) [![Thierry Fremaux ](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Collage-Maker-27-Mar-2023-07-43-PM-6555.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https://variety.com/2026/film/global/cannes-chief-thierry-fremaux-2026-lineup-hollywood-films-1236697525/) ### [Cannes Chief Thierry Frémaux on Hollywood Cutbacks, Festival Politics and Industry Upheaval: 'Our Mission Is Very Simple — to Define What Cinema Will Be in 2026' (EXCLUSIVE)](https://variety.com/2026/film/global/cannes-chief-thierry-fremaux-2026-lineup-hollywood-films-1236697525/) Which makes it all the more confounding that Cherry’s new soap opera, the CBS All Access drama “[Why Women Kill](https://variety.com/t/why-women-kill/),” is yet the latest show to fail to learn the lessons of one of the last truly huge network hits. His three protagonists — played by [Lucy Liu](https://variety.com/t/lucy-liu/), Ginnifer Goodwin, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste — exist in different timelines, each coping with a collapsing marriage and seeming to move closer to homicide with each slight. That isolation may be part of the show’s point: that these women are driven over the edge by the lack of camaraderie in their lives, a condition that recurs through the decades. But it makes for a deeply unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes, a show whose skittish leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded. ### Popular on Variety The least successful of the show’s three strands is the one that’s most in line with the goofy excess for which Cherry is best known. Liu’s character exists in a “Dynasty”-style 1980s, clothed in neon synthetic fabrics and trapped in a marriage in which wealth stands in for love and for fidelity. Liu vamps through the role unconvincingly. She’s too good at being tough to credibly fall apart the way the show demands, and forces her voice into reediness as a stand-in for a manically collapsing vulnerability she can’t sell. Cherry has walked this path before, with Bree on “Desperate Housewives” — an exaggerated caricature of femininity and materialism. But Marcia Cross’s performance was richly layered, and Cross was given access to co-stars on her level. Liu, for all she is badly miscast, still devours her scenes by force of star power; she may not convince you of what she’s going through, but there’s little else worth focusing on, no true friend or potential swain on her particular level. Similarly, Ginnifer Goodwin dominates a story of a cheated-on housewife in the 1960s, adding her familiar warmth and naivete to a tale so reliant on archetypes that it practically tells itself. Goodwin has devoted her life to a man whose greatness as a provider turns out illusory; she gets mad, then, as the cliché goes, prepares to get even. Both Liu’s and Goodwin’s stories, given a short amount of time and one real character apiece, lean hard on collective memory of their eras, as if the fact that a generic story of unfaithfulness in marriage can be enlivened because its protagonist is dressed like June Cleaver or like Alexis Carrington. At least, in the present-day storyline, such shorthand isn’t easily available, though the show can hardly be said to be straining in the story it tells here. A lascivious Reid Scott aims for a threesome between his wife (Howell-Baptiste) and her girlfriend (Alexandra Daddario, to whom I am not related). They may not be in costumes designed to evoke the late 2010s the way Goodwin’s and Liu’s are of their historical moments, but both Howell-Baptiste’s and Daddario’s characters existing solely as extensions of a man’s libido feels, unfortunately, as contemporary as it gets. The lasting impact of “Desperate Housewives” remains — strangely — the use of “housewife” as a synonym for any woman on the unkillable “Real Housewives” franchise. Few shows have time or energy for the humane curiosity of Cherry’s breakout show, a drama-comedy hybrid that was content to spend scenes allowing characters to show us who they were in their reactions to big crises and to very small ones, too — and then to debrief among friends and frenemies. In spending time only at the moments of highest tension in its three protagonists’ lives, “Why Women Kill” leaches them of anything other than their ability to create drama. We’ll surely eventually find out precisely why they kill. We may never learn how it is they live, or what they live for. “Why Women Kill.” CBS All Access. August 15. (Two episodes screened for review). Cast: Lucy Liu, Ginnifer Goodwin, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Jack Davenport, Sam Jaeger, Reid Scott, Alexandra Daddario, Sadie Calvano, Leo Howard, Alicia Coppola, and Katie Finneran. Executive Producers: Marc Cherry, Brian Grazer, Francie Calfo, Michael Hanel, Mindy Schultheis, and Marc Webb #### Read More About: - [Lucy Liu,](https://variety.com/t/lucy-liu/) - [Why Women Kill](https://variety.com/t/why-women-kill/) [Jump to Comments](https://variety.com/2019/tv/reviews/why-women-kill-review-1203294108/#article-comments) ## More from Variety - [![Young Miko](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Credit_-Joshua-Rivera-@shotsjpg-Press-Pic-e1775479005306.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https://variety.com/2026/music/news/young-miko-late-checkout-tour-dates-1236709236/) ### [Young Miko Announces ‘Late Checkout’ Tour — 31 Dates, 11 Countries (EXCLUSIVE)](https://variety.com/2026/music/news/young-miko-late-checkout-tour-dates-1236709236/) JavaScript is required to load the comments. 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Readable Markdown	1. [Home](https://variety.com/) 2. [TV](https://variety.com/v/tv/) 3. [Reviews](https://variety.com/c/reviews/) ## TV Review: ‘Why Women Kill’ "Why Women Kill" is an unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes whose leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded. !["Murder Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry" -- Ep\#101 -- Pictured (l-r): Jack Davenport as Karl; Lucy Liu as Simone of the CBS All Access series WHY WOMEN KILL. Photo Cr: Ali Goldstein/CBS ©2019 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/115138_1230b.jpg?w=1000&h=563&crop=1) CBS The best moments of “Desperate Housewives” — Marc Cherry’s pathbreaking and strangely underrated 2000s soap opera — were the ones in which the wives got to talking. The four main characters on the show, which came on the air shortly after the end of “Sex and the City” and transplanted aspects of its formula from Manhattan to anonymous suburbia, each represented a particular way of thinking about love, marriage, and the home. The murders and scandal that made the show’s name felt ornamental when debate and frank talk played out over hedges or at the ladies’ poker night. Which makes it all the more confounding that Cherry’s new soap opera, the CBS All Access drama “[Why Women Kill](https://variety.com/t/why-women-kill/),” is yet the latest show to fail to learn the lessons of one of the last truly huge network hits. His three protagonists — played by [Lucy Liu](https://variety.com/t/lucy-liu/), Ginnifer Goodwin, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste — exist in different timelines, each coping with a collapsing marriage and seeming to move closer to homicide with each slight. That isolation may be part of the show’s point: that these women are driven over the edge by the lack of camaraderie in their lives, a condition that recurs through the decades. But it makes for a deeply unsatisfying show cobbled together from vignettes, a show whose skittish leaps between storylines leaves good actors stranded. The least successful of the show’s three strands is the one that’s most in line with the goofy excess for which Cherry is best known. Liu’s character exists in a “Dynasty”-style 1980s, clothed in neon synthetic fabrics and trapped in a marriage in which wealth stands in for love and for fidelity. Liu vamps through the role unconvincingly. She’s too good at being tough to credibly fall apart the way the show demands, and forces her voice into reediness as a stand-in for a manically collapsing vulnerability she can’t sell. Cherry has walked this path before, with Bree on “Desperate Housewives” — an exaggerated caricature of femininity and materialism. But Marcia Cross’s performance was richly layered, and Cross was given access to co-stars on her level. Liu, for all she is badly miscast, still devours her scenes by force of star power; she may not convince you of what she’s going through, but there’s little else worth focusing on, no true friend or potential swain on her particular level. Similarly, Ginnifer Goodwin dominates a story of a cheated-on housewife in the 1960s, adding her familiar warmth and naivete to a tale so reliant on archetypes that it practically tells itself. Goodwin has devoted her life to a man whose greatness as a provider turns out illusory; she gets mad, then, as the cliché goes, prepares to get even. Both Liu’s and Goodwin’s stories, given a short amount of time and one real character apiece, lean hard on collective memory of their eras, as if the fact that a generic story of unfaithfulness in marriage can be enlivened because its protagonist is dressed like June Cleaver or like Alexis Carrington. At least, in the present-day storyline, such shorthand isn’t easily available, though the show can hardly be said to be straining in the story it tells here. A lascivious Reid Scott aims for a threesome between his wife (Howell-Baptiste) and her girlfriend (Alexandra Daddario, to whom I am not related). They may not be in costumes designed to evoke the late 2010s the way Goodwin’s and Liu’s are of their historical moments, but both Howell-Baptiste’s and Daddario’s characters existing solely as extensions of a man’s libido feels, unfortunately, as contemporary as it gets. The lasting impact of “Desperate Housewives” remains — strangely — the use of “housewife” as a synonym for any woman on the unkillable “Real Housewives” franchise. Few shows have time or energy for the humane curiosity of Cherry’s breakout show, a drama-comedy hybrid that was content to spend scenes allowing characters to show us who they were in their reactions to big crises and to very small ones, too — and then to debrief among friends and frenemies. In spending time only at the moments of highest tension in its three protagonists’ lives, “Why Women Kill” leaches them of anything other than their ability to create drama. We’ll surely eventually find out precisely why they kill. We may never learn how it is they live, or what they live for. “Why Women Kill.” CBS All Access. August 15. (Two episodes screened for review). Cast: Lucy Liu, Ginnifer Goodwin, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Jack Davenport, Sam Jaeger, Reid Scott, Alexandra Daddario, Sadie Calvano, Leo Howard, Alicia Coppola, and Katie Finneran. Executive Producers: Marc Cherry, Brian Grazer, Francie Calfo, Michael Hanel, Mindy Schultheis, and Marc Webb ## More from Variety - [![Young Miko](https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Credit_-Joshua-Rivera-@shotsjpg-Press-Pic-e1775479005306.jpg?w=250&h=167&crop=1)](https://variety.com/2026/music/news/young-miko-late-checkout-tour-dates-1236709236/) ![](https://px.ads.linkedin.com/collect/?pid=1429113&fmt=gif)
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