Marc Cherry was pretty awful to work for, according to one Desperate Housewives writer

Patty Lin says she experienced "overt racism" for the first time in Cherry's writers' room

By Emma Keates  |  August 31, 2023 | 3:41pm
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Marc Cherry was pretty awful to work for, according to one Desperate Housewives writer
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Marc Cherry with the cast of Desperate Housewives in 2006 Photo: Kevin Winter

Back in 2014, we posited that Desperate Housewives—the Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross, and Eva Longoria-starring dark comedy about a not-so-idyllic suburban neighborhood—would have been better if it ended after one season. Per some information from her new memoir, End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood, it sounds like former script writer Patty Lin would have agreed with us.

In her memoir, Lin—who also worked on Friends, Breaking Bad, and Freaks And Geeks—writes that she was considering quitting the business in 2004 until the pilot script for Desperate Housewives “won [her] over.” But, like that original episode penned by show creator Marc Cherry, things would quickly reveal themselves to be a lot more problematic than they initially seemed.

Upon joining the writers’ room for the first season, Lin writes that she quickly discovered she was the only person of color among a staff of ten people. While there was a “honeymoon period,” it didn’t last. “Not with this many big personalities,” she writes. “The biggest was Marc’s. I had never encountered overt racism until I worked for him.”

In one example, Lin writes that the staff was discussing Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl, a 1994 sitcom about growing up in a Korean-American family. “Marc turned to me and said, ‘Patty, you should write a show like that,’” the author recalled. “I love Margaret Cho, but please don’t lump us together just because we’re both Asian women in show business.”

In addition, Lin alleges that Cherry was wildly disorganized. “As soon as Marc wrote the first episode after the pilot, it became obvious to me that he didn’t have a vision yet of what the show was going to be. This uncertainty, paired with his obsessive tendencies, amounted to a showrunner who was impossible to please,” she writes. “He rewrote even his own material with a maniacal drive… He was incapable of articulating what he wanted. It was maddening.”

Lin’s comments reiterate many of the currently striking writers’ demands for well-oiled, well-compensated systems to be put in place. “The quality that had attracted me to the pilot—the dark humor—was lost in the slapdash, assembly-line approach to what was supposed to be a creative process. We were putting out schlock,” she writes. “The fact that it became the hottest show on TV, won multiple awards, ran for eight years, and earned more revenue than God still boggles my mind.”

[via Entertainment Weekly]

 
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