Cherry On Top
Marc Cherry found fame and fortune with his TV hit Desperate Housewives. But not too long ago Cherry himself was "desperate."
Just two months after "Desperate Housewives" premiered in October 2004 on ABC, it had a cult following of 25 million viewers each week. Since then the series has become an international hit: fans talk about the goings on in Wisteria Lane around the water cooler and over the dinner table, in cafes and internet chat rooms. It had commanded enormous advertising revenue, caused a great deal of controversy and featured on the cover of Newsweek. Even Oprah wanted to do one of her shows from Wisteria Lane.
ABC television network boss Steven McPherson agrees. "Desperate Housewives really tapped into an audience that was not being serviced," he says. "But I think more than anything, it allowed us to laugh again."
Desperate Housewives winning streak shows no sign of stopping. The show won best comedy ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild awards last year and recently the stars were given $250,000 bonuses as a "thank you" gift from the network.
Not bad for the shows creator Marc Cherry; who at the age of 40 found himself without a job and owing his mother $30,000 - despite the fact that he had been a successful screenwriter from 1985 to 1992, writing on the series Golden Girls followed by Designer Women.
At the time Cherry had not had an interview in two years. To make matters worse, he had found out that his agent had embezzled $79,000 from him. "I was washed up. People just weren't excited by my name." he recalls. "That's one of the reasons I had to write something really smart."
Almost all of the major networks and their cable competitors turned down the script for Desperate Housewives. Part of the problem was the fact that Cherry's agent had promoted it as a black comedy. At a time when reality TV and crime series reigned supreme, most studio bosses were not interested in a prime time soap opera about 40 something housewives.
It was ailing network ABC that eventually took a chance on Cherry's idea. That decision turned out to be a stroke of genius when the show climbed the ratings chart faster than any other show in the last 10 years.
In the midst of all this success Cherry remains humble. "At 32, you're thinking, 'I deserve this, I've earned this,'" he says. "At 42, you think, 'I'm lucky.'"
Eva Longoria, who plays Gabrielle, believes that the show is so successful because women can relate to the characters. "When we went on Oprah, every single woman in the audience said they had been through similar situations, they had been that miserable."
Cherry spent his childhood in southern California and Oklahoma and recalls that life in the suburbs was not always perfect. "I remember the husbands leaving with their suitcases and my parents saying, 'You're not allowed to ask them what is going on.' I remember the custody battles. The full range of human experience was there."
Cherry drew his inspiration for the show from his own mother who left her career as an opera singer to raise her three children. "I was trying to write the truth of one woman, but I felt if I was writing it well enough, I was writing it for many women."
