Tuesday, November 16, 2004
The show's creator drew on his own experience.
By WILLIAM BOOTH
WASHINGTON POST
LOS ANGELES -- Marc Cherry, the creator of "Desperate Housewives," himself was a bit desperate when he sat down to write the pilot for the show. He'd been a writer for "Golden Girls" in the early '90s. He executive-produced the forgotten "Five Mrs. Buchanans" in 1994. Then he hit a very dry patch.
"Honestly, I wrote this script because I wasn't working. I went three staffing seasons without a job interview, let alone a job. I was kinda depressed, because apparently I didn't have the best rep in town. I knew I was smart, darn it, so I sat down to write the smartest thing I knew how to do." Darn it. Gosh. Golly. That's the Midwesterner in Cherry coming out (his dad was an oil exec, so he lived in Oklahoma, Hong Kong and Iran as a kid).
Cherry, a bachelor, says the inspiration came from his mother. The two were sitting around one day at her place in Orange County when a bit appeared on the news about the Andrea Yates trial -- the woman who drowned her five children in a bathtub. Son Marc said something like, "How desperate." Mother Martha Cherry remarked, "I've been there." And the idea was born.
Four types
"I wanted the four archetypes to represent the four different types of women I experienced in the suburbs. To look at my own mother, there are aspects of all four. She had three kids, my father was off getting his master's degree, and she couldn't handle us. It was actually a revelation of how difficult those times were that led me to this idea. My mother was a woman who insisted on everything being pleasant, and wearing pearls, and wanting everything to seem so very nice. We were a very repressed family who didn't express our emotions a lot."
That's where Bree comes from.
"But I also had a relationship with my mom, being able to talk to her about almost anything. And that's very much in evidence in Teri Hatcher's character (divorc & eacute;e Susan Mayer) and her relationship with her daughter in the series."
And the vixen Gabrielle? Or the overworked mom Lynette, who stepped off the corporate ladder to raise the ankle-biters?
"My mom was a woman who gave up her career as a singer to move to the suburbs," says Cherry. "I don't think she was ever bored and had an affair with her gardener, but certainly what Gabrielle goes through in terms of having an exciting life and now living in the burbs, yes, I drew some colors from that."