Desperate Savior
Marc Cherry turns domestic angst into a network's hope
By Deborah Starr Siebel -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/20/2004
Marc Cherry bounds out of his golf cart and crosses the lush green lawn of a
Universal Studios backlot house that used to be home to Leave It to Beaver.
He relishes the fact that the Cleavers used to live here. But if Ward and June
Cleaver knew what this writer was up to, they'd be horrified: Nothing of the
innocence of that time-honored classic will air on his show.
Instead, the children will be wildly out of control, and the confused, anxiety-
ridden grownups will fall victim to suicide, greed, betrayal and adultery-all
the result of misdirected lives. In one of the most highly anticipated shows on
the new fall schedule, Beaver Cleaver's house has become part of Wisteria Lane,
an enclave of perfectly manicured suburban homes hiding the darkly funny secrets
of its inhabitants, ABC's Desperate Housewives.
As crafted by Cherry, who cut his comic teeth on the acerbic humor of The Golden
Girls, Housewives is a crazy-quilt prime time soap opera. Premiering Sunday
Oct. 3 at 9 p.m. ET, the show mixes the suburban cul-de-sac glamour of Knots
Landing with the mystery of Twin Peaks. Stepping into this world, where the
houses are washed in bright paint-box colors, feels like stepping into the
pages of a comic book. Later, pulling away from his computer, he says, "It's
good for me to get out. Good to take a little break."
At 42, Cherry is a jovial man with thinning sandy hair, wire-rimmed glasses
and a profile that suggests he spends more time at the computer than at the
gym. He oozes Midwestern warmth (he spent much of his youth on a farm with his
two sisters in Kingfisher, Okla.).
"Marc, you're going to love what we did today," says his director, Fred Gerber,
who called to regale him with the story of one of the lead actress's getting
hoisted over a neighborhood fence a bit too enthusiastically by her on-screen
lover: "She put her foot in his hands-and she went flying."
Cherry smiles. "I can't wait to see it."
As creator and executive producer of the most buzzed-about pilot of the fall
season, Cherry has done the near-impossible: written a spec drama pilot that
could ultimately turn him into one of the unlikely saviors of ABC's long-
struggling prime time lineup. In a season when franchises, spinoffs and
copycats rule, he offers a fresh vision. And against the odds, he has done
it at a time when his career was circling the drain. "I was absolutely a
desperate writer," he says.
Over the past 13 years, Cherry has seen his once thriving TV writing career
take a long, slow and very painful nosedive. After Golden Girls in the 1980s
and its ill-fated spinoff Golden Palace in '92, there were other sitcoms,
even pilot deals. But between 2001 and 2003, before selling Housewives as a
spec script, Cherry was simply unemployed. "I couldn't even get a job interview,"
he says.
He looked around and didn't like what he saw. Sitcoms were drying up. His
then agent "was arrested for embezzlement," he says. And, in an industry
where maturity is often looked upon as a near-fatal disease, he was turning
40. "It hit me hard," he says. "I was just sitting at home, going, well,
now what do I do?"
What Cherry did, in no small part, was watch television. In 2001, he and
his mother were watching the televised coverage of the trial of Andrea Yates,
the Texas woman who was ultimately convicted of drowning her five children
in the bathtub. "I turned to [my mother] and said, 'Gosh, can you imagine
a woman being so desperate that she would hurt her own children?' And my
mother took her cigarette out of her mouth and turned to me and said,
'I've been there.'"
That brutally honest and unsettling response ("You must understand that
I always thought of my mom as the perfect wife and mother," he says.)
prompted Cherry to look at the lives of millions of American housewives
who are struggling to make their own lives work. His central question,
which fuels the entire series, became the following: "What do you do when
the life you've chosen doesn't make you happy?"
In the process, Cherry began a reexamination of his own life and choices
he had made. At the time, with his career gone cold, he decided that the
smartest thing to do was to get out of the sitcom game altogether. "The
things that the networks were buying, I thought, were stupid," he says.
"Very often, it was the dumb idea about the schlubby dad with the beautiful
wife, which has already been done a thousand times before. And I was like,
'You want me to write that again?'"
The rough transition worsened as Cherry's bank account dwindled to the
point where he had to ask his mother for a loan. He got into such a funk,
in fact, that he was assailed by serious doubts about his talent. "It
gets to the point where you wonder if you were just lucky to have worked
for a number of years. An idiot writer, but lucky."
Still, Cherry stuck to his reinvention plan, studying Alan Ball's
screenplay for the Academy Award-winning American Beauty and teleplays
for Six Feet Under, as well as scripts by Woody Allen. "I was studying
how they did it, these guys that came from comedy."
He thought he had written a pretty good script. But when his former
agent sent out the final product, "everybody passed," says Cherry. A
whole year went by. Then another. When his new agents at Paradigm finally
read the script, they proposed pitching it not as a dark comedy but as a
campy soap-a calculated nod to the success of Fox's The O.C. Bingo.
"When I first got the call," says Stephen McPherson, head of ABC Entertainment,
"and his agents said, 'Hey, there's a comedy writer you may know, and he's got
a drama spec script,' I will be the first to admit, I wasn't going, Boy, this
is gonna be great!" But McPherson, then head of Touchstone Television, read it,
put it down and said, "I gotta have this script. I gotta be in business on this
project."
Within a week, the script was sold to ABC, and Cherry was thrown into the
deep end as a comedy writer now assigned to executive-produce an hour drama.
"This is where I was really smart," he says. "I kept announcing to people,
at every opportunity, 'I'm an idiot about this end of the business. Help me.'
As soon as you start being honest about what you don't know, people are more
than happy to help."
"Marc's a fascinating guy," says McPherson. "Whip smart. Very funny. Cynical
but at the same time curious and hopeful about the way things can be. He looks
at the complications of our lives with incredible curiosity and in a way that
leads to incredibly entertaining writing."
Word got out about the off-beat project, and "every actress in town between
the ages of 35 and 50 came in to read for the parts," says Executive Producer
Michael Edelstein, who was brought in to run the production end of the show.
Housewives has an enormous cast, with 13 series regulars (including Teri Hatcher,
Nicollette Sheridan, Marcia Cross and Felicity Huffman) and seven recurring
characters.
So now, Cherry faces an eight-day production schedule that has him
polishing scripts written by himself and his writing team almost constantly.
"I've had about six days off since June," he says, not the least bit
unhappy. How much pressure is he feeling to deliver now that expectations
are running so high? "None," says Cherry. "I've failed too many times in
this industry. Even if I fail with this, it's been a perfectly great failure."
Even June Cleaver might appreciate that.
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