No hysteria on Wisteria

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This article was published 31/07/2010 (5906 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif — On a cool, sunny, southern-California morning, there’s a sense of calm purpose in the air on Wisteria Lane.

Clearly, these Desperate times don’t call for desperate measures.

The cast and creator of the long-running ABC series Desperate Housewives, who have just started production on the show’s seventh season, were in a cheerful, expansive mood earlier this week when they welcomed a group of visiting TV critics to their suburban-streetscape set on the Universal Studios backlot.

Series creator/executive producer Marc Cherry, flanked by co-stars Marcia Cross (Bree) and Eva Longoria Parker (Gabrielle), told the curious cluster of media types that Season 7 will be more about incremental change — mysteries resolved, relationships unravelled, a sprinkling of new, nasty Wisteria Lane neighbours — than earth-shaking, time-warping major overhauls like the one that took place between seasons 4 and 5.

"One of the things I love about the history of this show is that we have so many rich things to draw upon," Cherry said, seated on a folding director’s chair in the living room of 4358 Wisteria Lane (known, in the series, as the home of Mrs. McCluskey). "I really took a risk with the five-year jump (between seasons 4 and 5); I think it paid off beautifully and really reinvigorated the show. We’ve occasionally done little time jumps — one time we did six months, other times we did one month — at the beginning of the season. Might I do something more, like a year? I think I might, but nothing more than that."

The bigger changes on Wisteria Lane this year have to do with people, not places or times. As the seventh season unfolds, Lynette (Felicity Huffman) will be reunited with an old college "frenemy" (in the form of new cast addition Vanessa Williams) who forces her to re-evaluate her life, and strait-laced Bree will find herself in the arms of a new, younger, slightly dangerous love interest (played by Brian Austin Green).

"Bree’s going to be involved with a hunky, blue-collar contractor," Cherry said of Green’s impending arrival. "We want to take Bree out of her refined, educated world… and expose some different colours in her, so we’re giving her a different kind of guy to be up against — someone who’s younger and who would be challenging to Bree."

The casting of Williams — who will play a friend/rival from Lynette’s college days moving onto Wisteria Lane as the wealthy, cultured and quite opinionated wife of a professional baseball player — came as a result of a suggestion from recently departed ABC Entertainment chief Stephen McPherson, who was eager to keep the former Ugly Betty co-star on the network’s talent roster.

Cherry met with Williams in New York last spring, while she was appearing in the Broadway musical Sondheim on Sondheim.

"At first, I was very skeptical, because she was just coming off another ABC show, and she just hadn’t been on my radar," he recalled. "I walked into this restaurant in New York, very stern and sort of with my arms crossed; by halfway through the lunch I was saying, ‘Please do my show.’

"I just fell in love with her. She really got the tonality of the show, and I knew she was capable of doing some pretty wicked comedy based on her performance on Ugly Betty. But what really struck me was her understanding of what we’re doing here, and I was convinced very quickly (that she’d be a good fit)."

Cherry, who is currently at work on another series pilot for ABC, said he isn’t sure how much longer Desperate Housewives will run, but he has a very precise idea of how the end will happen when it does finally come.

"I’ve got a contract that keeps me around ABC for a few more years, and we’re in talks, so we hope (Housewives) will be around for a few more seasons, he said. "I am writing a new pilot… (but) my thing is that I probably will always be an executive producer and consultant of this show. It’s my baby, and I can’t let go. I’ve got control issues.

"I absolutely know the last scene of the show. I’m a big fan of the Harry Potter books and of J.K. Rowling; I kind of identify with her a bit because she was really kind of low and then all of a sudden she found this massive success, and I certainly went through my own version of that. And I loved the fact she always said she knew the last chapter of the Harry Potter books, and that got me thinking about how I wanted to end this show.

"So I very much have it all mapped out in my head. When we know, working with ABC and the ladies, what the last season is, I will tell my writing staff, ‘OK, here’s what we’re writing to,’ and then we will build that last season accordingly."

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

 

Williams enjoys ‘a piece of cake’

IT’S been a very short trip from high-fashion diva-dom on Ugly Betty to new-neighbour suburban schemer on Desperate Housewives, and Vanessa Williams says she welcomes the challenge of joining a well-established roster of female stars who are at the top of their TV-drama game.

"I observe, I’m very respectful, and I ask a lot of questions," she said of her approach to entering the Desperate Housewives world. "And I’m the kind of actress who likes to be directed, so it’s not like I’ve got a certain way I like to work and I expect them to conform to that. I’ll just see how it works — every set has a different vibe, so I’ll just try to blend in and adapt."

So far, Williams added, the transition has been very smooth.

"They’ve been very welcoming, and very accommodating," she said.

Series creator Marc Cherry said it only took one lunch-meeting conversation with Williams for him to know that she’d be at home on Wisteria Lane.

"One of things I’ve learned over the evolution of the show is that a lot of different talents are required to be on Desperate Housewives," he explained. "You have to be able to do both comedy and drama — for the drama, you have to have a twinkle in your eye, and for the comedy, you have to be really rooted in reality."

When asked if she was daunted by the idea of jumping back into a TV-drama schedule so soon after Ugly Betty ended, Williams could only chuckle.

"Coming off Broadway, where you’re working your behind off for eight shows a week, this is truly being pampered," she said. "It’s a piece of cake."