See Also: Marc Cherry (Creator) People Guide

Marc Cherry spoke recently about how even his failures are important experience for him as a writer, and how he came to develop Desperate Housewives.

"I have to say I wouldn't trade my failures for anything," he told the Philadelphia Daily News. "I did a show called The Crew that was about flight attendants, and it was dreadful. And the whole time I couldn't figure out why it was dreadful because I was working as hard on it as anything I'd ever done. And it was the time I spent examining the causes for the failure that I started to learn how not to create a TV show."

Cherry told interviewer Ellen Gray that after a period of his career being in the doldrums, he finally got to work on Desperate Housewives — a decision that would turn his career around. "I think that the last couple of projects I'd done were just run-of-the-mill stuff," he said. "And what I really did with this one is that I sat down more than anything to impress myself. This was the sentence in my head, this is no lie. 'I'm going to write something so eff-ing good, they have to pay attention to me.'"

Once Cherry had started, he drew inspiration from a variety of sources. "So I was looking at all these Woody Allen scripts... I was reading Alan Ball [American Beauty, Six Feet Under] like it was my Bible... studying the writing: How does he infuse depth, how do these characters relate to each other, how does he tell his stories? I just spent four months on that first draft. It was exhausting, and sometimes I would spend a whole day on just like, you know, five lines... because I was really for the first time writing without punchlines. You know, that's like working without a net for a comedy guy like me."

For the full interview, where Cherry also talks about his mother, listening to women, the transition from comedy to drama and the "nipple problem" click here.

Discuss this news item at Talk Desperate!
 Add Get Desperate! RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!