With “Why Women Kill,” Marc Cherry delivers his best series since the long-running hit “Desperate Housewives.” Bitingly funny, it echoes the best satiric elements of the ABC hit without the baggage of having too many characters with subplots that fall all over themselves.

The 10-episode limited series takes a merrily irreverent look at how infidelity can derail even the most stable marriage, but with an innovative approach. Cherry picks three different married women from three different decades — the 1960s, 1980s and now — and shows how the times in which they live shape their behavior and expectations.

Beth Ann (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a deceptively simple housewife, Simone (Lucy Liu) is a high-octane socialite and Taylor (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) is an adulterous lawyer. They all live in the same Spanish-style mansion that provides a backdrop to three separate crime scenes. As one of their neighbors ruefully remarks while a corpse is rolled-out of the house on a gurney, “Death is cheaper than divorce.”

The acting styles nicely vary for each woman in her particular decade, with “Big Love’s” Goodwin proving how good she really is as she registers Beth Ann’s frustration and exasperation when she fails to rouse her dolt of a husband (Sam Jaeger). Liu and Jack Davenport, as Karl, Simone’s gay spouse, go at each other like a spoiled, catty couple in an Aaron Spelling prime-time soap. When Karl fakes a suicide attempt to win her sympathy after she finds physical evidence of his wandering eye, he quips, “You don’t respond to small gestures.”

If “Why Women Kill’s” contemporary couple, Taylor (Howell-Baptiste) and Eli (Reid Scott), pales by comparison — despite their having an open marriage and a frothy three-way with one of her gal pals — chalk it up to Cherry’s expertise in exposing an amusing kind of suburban rot under period-perfect wardrobe and visually vibrant set design. Eli, in his Cal State Fullerton T-shirt, doesn’t cut quite the same figure as Karl in a Nolan Miller-era tuxedo, and Scott’s chemistry with Howell-Baptiste is not as winning as it might be.

It’s a minor complaint. “Why Women Kill” is a self-contained series so viewers will know which spouses fall victim to marital machinations before the 10 episodes are up. On the way, viewers will enjoy Cherry’s delicious wit and a trio of actresses having the time of their lives.