With critical opinion of Desperate Housewives returning more to its season one glory days, one of those responsible for the show's turnaround—new consulting producer Jeff Greenstein—has spoken about what attracted him to the show and his influence on this season's direction.

Greenstein, who joined at the beginning of season three, told The Futon Critic that he thought Housewives "would be a great opportunity to work on a high-profile show with great people, and also grow as a writer." He had just finished working on seven years of Will and Grace, so when invited to join the creative time behind Housewives by Marc Cherry he jumped at the chance. "I was looking to change it up a bit. I felt like I had reached the apex of what you can do in multi-camera half-hours, and so the idea of trying my hand at a one-hour, especially one that can be dark and has a mystery element and serial plotting, I thought that would be challenging and fun. The guiding principle of my career has always been, 'Are the people nice? Am I gonna learn stuff? Is the work going to be good? Am I going to get home in time to see my wife and son?' And in this case, the answer to all of those questions has been 'yes'."

He said his new job began with a discussion on the direction of season three. "There was a philosophical discussion about how this year should be different," he said. "Something I pushed for a lot, and something that was important to Marc, was that the show move in a more comedic direction. And I guess that's why he went out and got me and two Frasier writers to join the staff. Marc wanted to make sure the show didn't lose that unique mixture of comedy and drama that made Desperate Housewives so special when it first hit. So when we break stories for the show, when we write scenes, when we talk about arcs for the characters, we're always looking for spin and perversity."

A recurring criticism of the show during season two was that the housewives didn't get many scenes together. This hasn't gone unnoticed, and he said more time has been devoted to their collective scenes. "The challenge was to make sure the women get opportunities to be in scenes together. One of the things that came up in the early discussions was how to make the Susan/Mike vector intersect with the Bree/Orson vector, so that all those characters are caught up in the mystery. There was also a general feeling that last year, the women were too isolated from one another; they didn't have enough opportunities to interact as friends. You know, the poker scenes, the iced tea scenes. I know a lot of people have talked about how the hostage crisis episode was their favorite one this season, but my favorite was the one the week before, where we had all the girls swilling margaritas on the porch and getting drunk together. I just love that stuff, the women leaning on each other. We've made room for a lot more of that this year."

The full interview can be found at The Futon Critic.

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