Desperate Housewives: The Unknown Origins of the Major 2000s Series

Her name is Martha Cherry and she is the one who inspired the series that made her son (Mark Cherry) a successful showrunner. It all begins when a mother-daughter duo watches a TV show about a woman who drowned her own children. “I turned to him and said, ‘God, can you imagine a woman so desperate that she would hurt her own children?’ Mark Cherry said shortly before the Desperate Housewives came out. “And my mother took the cigarette out of her mouth and turned to me and said, “I was there.” (The Salt Lake Tribune, May 2012) Everything then changes for Mark, who realizes for the first time that housewives also lead difficult, even…desperate lives. And at that time his life was not at all rosy. Since his stint as a writer and producer on the comedy Les Craquantes (or The Golden Girls for VO fans), 12 years have passed: 12 years, 4 failed sitcoms, and he hasn’t worked at all for 4 years. And as if that wasn’t enough, his agent is in jail for embezzlement. Mark then owes his mother a precious sum of money. “I owed my mother $100,000. I spent years without an interview. No one believed that I could be anything. I had friends who didn’t call me for a while. Then I got this script because it was an attempt to show people that I was a better screenwriter than they thought. “

Martha Cherry was indeed the starting point of the Desperate Housewives show, but she wasn’t just that: she also inspired some of its characters. First there’s a bit of Martha as Lynette Scavo’s (Felicity Huffman) resentful mother. Remember the mythical scene when Lynette leaves her children on the side of the road for a few minutes because they are out of control in the car: a screen transcription of the Mark-e-Martha moment! “I was 5 years old, sitting there thinking, ‘Surely he can’t be serious. Then he pulled the car back and said, ‘Are you ready to behave yourself now?'” she recalled. “You know, it might be child abuse, but it was totally effective.”

But above all, Martha is a little (a lot?) of Bree van de Kamp (Marcia Cross). The showrunner specifically remembers her mother making the bed while her father – suffering a heart attack – was waiting to be taken to the hospital, just like Brie in the series. It was also strongly characterized by the latter’s reaction to his homosexuality. Like Andrew Van de Kamp (Sean Pifrom), when Mark reveals his sexual orientation to his mother, her response is not what he had hoped for. “When I went to see my mother, she told me that the only thing she cared about was that she didn’t see me in heaven. And it was difficult to deal with him, considering that I had a kind of idyllic relationship with him all my life.” However, Andrew had a more adversarial relationship with Bree than Mark had with Martha. “I think I took the rest of my anger out on a woman I absolutely adored for turning her into this delusional psychopath,” Cheri said. But let’s make no doubt about it: Martha adores Bree… at least in some respects. “My mom loves that Marcia Cross is playing it because she thinks it somehow makes her more beautiful!”

And what about Martha Huber (Kristin Estabrook), the neighborhood gossip who drove Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong) to kill herself in the first episode? Yes, it was named after Martha Cherry. But we assure you: it’s a coincidence that Martha Huber was killed off on the show… well, we hope so! Of all the screenwriters who starred in the series, Mark Cherry He’s not the only one who’s used his own life to inspire his writing: “We solved the problems we had with a lot of people,” he describes. So it seems Desperate Housewives was also an outlet for people other than its creator. But don’t get me wrong: “I love my mother. Without my mother, there would be no Desperate Housewives.” That’s what it says.