Marc Cherry

This interview originally appeared in the MIPCOM 2008 issue of World Screen.

Desperate Housewives premiered on ABC in October 2004. Several weeks later, Newsweek put the main characters on its cover and the show was officially a runaway hit with viewers and a megabrand for the network. The series about suburban women driven crazy by their ordinary lives has sold to some 200 countries around the world. Creator Marc Cherry talks about the show, which he lovingly refers to as his “baby.”

WS: Desperate Housewives has started its fifth season. When you reach a certain level of success, is there pressure on you to keep that up or do you just focus on doing your job as best as you can?
CHERRY: Keeping the show fresh is the big challenge…trying to find new things to say and new story lines we haven’t done. The amount of stories I’ve used up in the first four seasons has been incredible. So just looking for new journeys to take the women on is always a big struggle, and it gets a little bit harder every season.
In terms of the pressure, I always tell people, when I wrote the pilot I was 40, unemployed and a comedy writer that no one wanted to hire. That’s pressure. Is having success and people wondering, ‘Well, can he do it again?’ That’s a lot easier to handle. As long as I can pay my bills, there’s not too much else I can’t handle pressure-wise.

WS: In the last episode of last season there was a flash-forward. Where did you get the idea for that technique?
CHERRY: I’ll tell you where it came from, and I do owe the creators of Lost a little bit of the credit for this. They got a lot of attention for doing flash-forwards. Theirs is actually unofficially a flash-forward because then they go back in time and work up to it.  
I wanted to do just a jump in time. It’s not a flash-forward—I’m moving the series forward because I wanted to reexamine these women’s lives in five years’ time and have them all be at different points in their lives. I felt a lot of the characters had reached a point of happiness or self satisfaction and I thought it would be good to get them back to ground zero and, like we did in the pilot, meet four women who’ve got something kind of wrong in their lives that they’re dealing with. And what was interesting for me was to take the women and give them each other’s problems.
When we pick up in five years’ time, Gabrielle is basically what Lynette was in the beginning of the series—a woman with two small children going insane. And then we’ve got Bree as a working woman dealing with the problems [associated] with that. We’re just juggling everything around. It was really my attempt to shake it up and do something that I thought would feel fresh for the fans.

WS: Where do you get your ideas from—friends, conversations?
CHERRY: Everywhere. I read things in magazines and that’ll trigger something. We’ll sit in the room and talk about incidents that happened to us when we were younger, things that happened to our mothers, so they can come that way. One time Doug Savant [who plays Tom Scavo] told a very personal story about something that happened in his first marriage and we ended up using that as the basis of an entire episode. So sometimes the actors give us stuff. I’m not proud! I’ll take my ideas anywhere I can get them as long as they are interesting and dark and feel like they haven’t been done before!

WS: Do you still write scripts yourself or do you outline the episodes and hand them to other writers?
CHERRY: Things have changed since the first season. I did a lot of writing from scratch and rewriting other people’s work alone in my office. I spent way too many hours doing that and almost killed myself. I was just so exhausted after that first year. We’ve developed a system over the past couple years where we come up with the story arcs together. No one writes an episode by themselves. Everyone takes a story line and goes off to write, they assemble it, I read it and with the help of my other executive producer, Bob Daily, we give notes on it. I have a big computer screen in my office where we sit and with the help of the other writers, I’ll polish the stuff. Everything goes through me, but I have an awful, awful lot of help.

WS: Some of the showrunners of superhit shows feel like CEOs of small companies because of all the promotion, merchandising and digital extensions. Has Desperate Housewives reached that kind of proportion?
CHERRY: You know, there are moments when I marvel at the things I’m supposed to give my opinion on! When they handed me the Desperate Housewives perfume and asked me to smell it, I thought, what in my background prepared me for this moment, exactly?
Most of the time I try to be just a writer. I feel my biggest job is to work with my writing staff and turn out scripts and worry about story lines, because for all the executive producer-ness of it all, if there is such a word, first and foremost I am a writer just trying to tell stories about people. Yes, I have to make decisions about casting, and I have to talk to the network about promos and when they are going to schedule us and how many episodes I can deliver, but I think most of the money I get is really for my writing services more so than for producing services or directorial services or my knowledge of product placement. So for me it’s most satisfying because there are so many different ways in which I am challenged and things that I have to offer opinions on outside of my normal writing, which is why I went into the business—just to be a writer. The producing stuff is easy, I actually laugh at people who want to be nonwriting executive producers, because that’s just the easiest job in the world. But sitting there and coming up with interesting dialogue and interesting stories that people haven’t seen done a million times on TV—that is really where I earn my bacon, as the saying goes.

WS: Do you oversee other people who decide on the merchandising that is connected to the show?
CHERRY: I’m certainly consulted on things. I let ABC know a long time ago that if they wanted to redo the show in South America, and they’ve had a couple of versions of the show airing there, I don’t need to check on the translations of the scripts. You guys take that and run with it, I don’t have the time. I’ve got one baby and I’m going to worry about that one. They do marketing and they’ve talked to me about certain things and I offer my opinion, or I can call up and say, “Hey I heard about X and I’m concerned about it,” but, by and large, I’ve let everyone know I want my focus to be here on this show.  

WS: So despite the fact that the show has turned into a megabrand, to you the nuts and bolts of it is still…
CHERRY: For the brand to mean anything, I’ve learned, certainly during season two of the show, that all my attention must be here. I’m not a good multitasker. Some of the guys who have multiple shows, their focus is really as nonwriting producers and they check in with the actual showrunner, who is the guy writing it. I didn’t want to oversee Desperate Housewives; I actually wanted to be making it.

WS: Desperate Housewives is a huge hit internationally, as well. Why do you think people from different cultures can relate to it?
CHERRY: I always felt, since I was first writing the pilot, that the show had a chance to do well overseas because the issue of ordinary women suddenly going a little crazy in their lives, and being desperate to find some happiness, or being desperate to fix their problems with their children, or fix their problems with their husbands, would be universal [issues.] And fortunately this show has a kind of pretty, glossy look to it, and for people who don’t necessarily relate to the stories of the women, they can still enjoy the comedy or just our gorgeous cast! But that for me was always the key—the universality of the theme of the series: Even ordinary women can be driven completely crazy at times with their lives. What do they do to solve their problems? That’s the question posed by the series, and I think you find it in every culture.

WS: Do you ever think about what you’ll do after Desperate Housewives?
CHERRY: Yeah. I’ve got another idea for a different TV show but first I think I’m going to write the book for a Broadway musical. That’s been a dream of mine. I was a musical theater major in college and want to get back to my roots.