It takes less than five minutes for Starz and Channel 4’s new six-part series The Couple Next Door to make its first reference to Desperate Housewives.

Pete (Alfred Enoch), a journalist at a struggling newspaper, and Evie (Eleanor Tomlinson), a pregnant primary school teacher, are moving into a cul-de-sac in Leeds. They’re reflecting on a version of suburbia that’s more American, or even fictional American, in nature than British, so the comparison is close to inevitable; Pete looks at the dog-walking, lawn-tending, externally obsessed neighborhood they’re moving into and assumes a communal beneath-the-surface rot that does, indeed, eventually emerge.

It’s the last Desperate Housewives reference in the series because, to put it simply, The Couple Next Door isn’t finally all that much like Desperate Housewives, especially the top-tier early seasons of Desperate Housewives that one might want to be compared to. The adaptation of a Dutch format — Nieuwe Buren,...