Screenwriter Patty Lin testifies about the writing conditions of the series “Desperate Housewives”, which according to them were so disastrous that no episode should have been able to be released!
Is Desperate Housewives a series of which no episode should have been visible? This is what emerges from the testimony of a screenwriter who worked on the first season of the show.
In the pages of his book End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood (cited by Entertainment Weekly), the author Patty Lin talks about her experience on the series in contact with its creator, Marc Cherry.
Patty Lin writes that she joined the series convinced by the writing of the Desperate pilot and its dark humor. She joined the writer’s room of the first season in 2004. The only person of color among a team of 10 people – Lin was born to Taiwanese immigrant parents, she quickly clashes with the egos of each other, especially that of Marc Cherry:
I had never encountered overt racism until I worked for him.
“As soon as Marc wrote the first post-pilot episode, it became clear to me that he did not yet have a vision of what the series was going to be. This uncertainty, coupled with obsessive tendencies, led to having a showrunner who was impossible to please. ‘No, that’s not it yet’ was his mantra. He even rewrote his own texts like a hysteric… He was unable to achieve what he wanted, c was infuriating.”
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Still according to Patty Lin, Cherry isolated herself from others to write “in a place kept secret because he had a short attention span” : “Keeping him solitary was the only way this hen would lay any eggs”. He only had two screenwriters in his “loyal team”and gave to others “what to take care of”.
A very special atmosphere therefore, which according to Lin, should have had tragic consequences on the series itself, but inexplicably did not:
With this vastly inefficient system, it’s a wonder a single episode of Desperate Housewives ever got out. The quality that had attracted me to the pilot (…) was lost for a mass-produced rubbish that no longer had anything to do with a creative process. We were making stew. The fact that the show became TV’s most anticipated, won awards, ran for eight years and grossed a fortune still baffles me.
Officially, Patty Lin is only credited with writing one episode of the series, Lost Confidence (Come Back To Me), S01E10. In this episode, Lynette (Felicity Huffman) struggles to leave her children with her nanny, while Maisy’s (Sharon Lawrence) double life threatens to destroy Bree’s (Marcia Cross) marriage. Following the disappearance of Martha Huber, Edie (Nicollette Sheridan) resolves to call the police. Susan (Teri Hatcher) discovers an intruder in her home and Gabrielle (Eva Longoria) suspects her husband of illegal activity.
ABC
Since Desperate, Marc Cherry has signed the series Devious Maid, centered on a group of maids of Latin origin working for wealthy families in the heart of luxurious villas in Beverly Hills and Why Women Kill, which follows the lives of three women living in three different eras as they deal with infidelity in their respective marriages.