ABC Writer was desperate for 'Housewives'

A hit couldn't have come at a better time for the creator of 'Desperate Housewives.'
By ELLEN GRAY
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- Before there were "Desperate Housewives," there was a desperate writer.
"I went for 21/2 years without getting an interview for a job, and then the most amazing thing happened: My agent was arrested for embezzlement," "Housewives" creator Marc Cherry told the world at this year's Golden Globes as he picked up the award for comedy.
It was a well-delivered line from a guy who'd worked on sitcoms for much of his career, but it probably didn't seem so funny back in the fall of 2002, with $79,000 missing, no job and, at that point, no interest from networks in the script he'd hoped would turn his career around.
His mother, Martha -- the woman whose dry comment, "I've been there," while watching the trial of Andrea Yates, who drowned her children, inspired Cherry to write the pilot for "Desperate Housewives" -- eventually had to lend him money to live.
In September 2003, the show was bought by ABC, a network whose ratings were in the basement. It was, he was told, the first script the network had bought "on spec" -- without any previous deal in place -- in eight years.
Three days later, Cherry got the $79,000 back from his agent.
Touching a nerve
This is Hollywood's version of a fairy tale: Struggling network takes chance on struggling writer, and they both hit it big.
But when it comes to angles, the story of Marc Cherry has more than one.
Like Darren Star and Michael Patrick King of HBO's "Sex and the City," he's a gay man whose work has touched a nerve with women. He tends to think this is a coincidence but admits that the fact that he actually listens to women when they talk -- because he's not interested in them sexually -- may have something to do with it.
"When I look at a woman, I want her to be strong and smart and funny, and if she's not those things, she doesn't hold my interest," he said.
A self-described conservative -- he voted for Bush the Elder and the Younger, once apiece, but won't say which times -- he's surprised to have found himself at the front lines of a culture war, taking flak about his show's content from groups that probably don't realize they're attacking a former member of the squeaky-clean song-and-dance ensemble the Young Americans. Or that most of the stuff they're complaining about has already been done for years on daytime soaps.
He's a man who listened to his mother and had it actually work out for him.
And maybe most important, he's a guy in his early 40s whose midlife crisis caused him to dig deep, to figure out what was important to him in his work, and how to fix it.
"So many people can recognize being out of work and being down. And I think the thing I get credit for is that I'm honest about it," Cherry said during an ABC party on the Wisteria Lane set of "Desperate Housewives."
'Guilty pleasure'
He also tends to be honest about laying blame, taking a helping for himself.
"I don't know that it was so much about my age, though it was a little bit about it," he said about the period when his calls weren't getting returned.
"I think that the last couple of projects I'd done were just run-of-the-mill stuff. And what I really did with this one is that I sat down more than anything to impress myself. This was the sentence in my head, this is no lie. 'I'm going to write something so eff-ing good, they have to pay attention to me,"' he recalled.
"So I was looking at all these Woody Allen scripts. . . . I was reading Alan Ball like it was my Bible . . . studying the writing: How does he infuse depth, how do these characters relate to each other, how does he tell his stories? I just spent four months on that first draft. It was exhausting, and sometimes I would spend a whole day on just like, you know, five lines . . . because I was really for the first time writing without punch lines. You know, that's like working without a net for a comedy guy like me," he said.
"I was so determined that this was going to be so classy. Now the joke is," and his voice rose toward the inevitable punch line, "I turn this thing out, I think I'm like Noel Coward, I'm George Bernard Shaw. So imagine my distress when ABC promotes it as 'this season's guilty pleasure.'
"You shouldn't feel guilty about watching this," he said, half-shouting, half-laughing. "This is really good! What are you talking about?"