Issue 30: The Desperate Housewives Get Their Claws Out

I remember when Desperate Housewives premiered in the UK. It was a very big deal. Every woman in my family watched it. My grandmother had the official calendar in her kitchen. Everyone obsessed over this sexy soapy drama about scandals in the suburbs. This was a time when network TV still ruled the roost and ABC’s primetime lineup ruled the roost: Desperate Housewives, Lost, and Boston Legal were the dramas to keep up with. But it was Marc Cherry’s creation was especially juicy. The pilot episode had 21.3 million viewers, giving it the biggest ratings of any ABC pilot since Spin City. Imagine Sex and the City crossed with American Beauty and a dash of murder mystery, and all centred on five women, four of whom were over 40 and had previously been written off by Hollywood as “over the hill.” It introduced the world to Eva Longoria and gave second wave boosts of mega-fame to Teri Hatcher, Nicollette Sheridan, Marcia Cross, and Felicity Huffman.

Of course, what you may remember about the show now is all of that behind-the-scenes drama. A show with five leads fighting for dominance became as obsessively covered as the OTT plotlines they acted out. Everyone picked their favourite housewife, on and off the screen (my gran loved Bree because “she’s a bitch!”) Behind-the-scenes drama has long been a part of TV history. Name an iconic series, especially one that was on network TV, and the chances are it had some turbulence going on when the cameras were off. With Desperate Housewives, it felt like no effort was being made by ABC or anyone involved to keep a lid on it. Audiences wanted it as much as the fake scandals. And when it came time for the quintet to get together for a Vanity Fair shoot, the drama took over in a big way.

Vanity Fair. “Bed, Burbs, and Beyond.” May 2005. Ned Zeman.

(Image via Vanity Fair.)

(Read the profile here.)

“In retrospect, we should have seen it coming—what with the on-set rumblings about “frayed nerves” and “difficulty” among “the Ladies,” and the crew’s jokes about one Lady’s “issues.” In retrospect, it was all so obvious, so inevitable. The warning signs were everywhere.”

That’s one hell of an opening paragraph. Marc Cherry seems genuinely nervous that the photoshoot won’t go well, and not just because he’s a showrunner who wants to keep control over the situation. Every aspect of this profile is going to be picked over for clues, and he knows it. So does Ned Zeman, who clearly had a blast writing it, or at least experienced some hardcore catharsis doing so. When listing the stars’ names, he adds, “Note to Publicists: Credits are listed in alphabetical order, so put down those cell phones.” He has to repeat this point more than once in the piece.

He doesn’t hide anything. He notes that the “mandatory stipulations from ABC” for this shoot included an entire glam team for each woman, and that “one Lady in particular” was “definitely not to be in the center” of any group shots. Hmm.

The actual central focus of the cover is Hatcher, who was often billed as the show’s real lead, a matter that was frequently disputed by others, mostly those in the cast. Before Desperate Housewives, she was best known as a Bond girl and Lois Lane in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and by her own admission, she was a “has-been.” Becoming Susan made her a star once more, which she describes as a surreal experience given her prior career slump. But she’s not wild about Desperate Housewives being described as a soap, which she associates with lower quality, worse lighting, and a distinct lack of cultural seriousness. She’s not wrong, although it wouldn’t be accurate to describe this show as non-soapy. And any slight hint at the conversation returning to The Drama has her wincing. Even Mike Denton, her most frequent male co-star, has to hop around the issue.

“I’m just doing my thing—you know what I mean?” She says. “So I don’t know [about the others]. I just show up on time, do my work, do my part, get the show promoted, help people, sign autographs.” Is this shade? Seems shady to me.

Up next is Felicity Huffman, who plays Lynette, “the harried, Ritalin-popping soccer mom.” Huffman came to the show as the most “serious” performer, having been a character actress favourite for many years alongside her husband William H. Macy. She worked with David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson, and had earned Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations for Sports Night. The same year this piece dropped, Huffman would star in Transamerica and earn an Oscar nomination. Huffman is the one, we’re told, who is maybe the most relatable but also the least drama-prone. This was many years before she went to jail for being involved in the college admissions scandal, which was an extremely Lynette thing for her to do.

In the piece, she is self-aware about the show being a “guilty pleasure” and the inevitable backlash a show about older women will face. She also “gets little grief from the cast and crew”, who seem to respect her willingness to push back on creative friction with seriousness and an eye towards the work. So, the issue ain’t with her!

Next: Marcia Cross, the former Melrose Place star who plays Bree, the WASP control freak to rule them all. “I thought of Melrose Place as like Andy Warhol, and I think of this show as Kandinsky or Francis Bacon,” she says, which is thoughtful but also objectively hilarious. She says she doesn’t read or listen to any of the Real Housewives drama surrounding her workplace. She doesn’t even watch her own show because “It’s too much. It’s just too much…” One wouldn’t blame her for sitting it all out. The moment the show became front page news, Cross, the only single one at the time, became the subject of some pretty seedy and homophobic rumours that she was closeted. She handled it pretty well, even when the hosts of The View kept badgering her about it.

Eva Longoria is the newbie of the group, and the youngest at 30. She’s the one without a previous hit show to her name. She’s on Maxim covers and is dating a basketball player. “Longoria is the class clown, the hair twirler, the whippersnapper.” For her, the show is obviously a great boost to her career, but the stakes are lower than they are for her colleagues, who have risen and fallen with the ebbs and flows of Hollywood and being an “older” woman within it. All of her chat about being the baby of the crew could seem shady to her co-stars, but it doesn’t read like that to me. I think Longoria was just an enthusiastic novice to the madness (although she was in the SNL parody sketch of this photoshoot, so she knew what was up.)

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Nicollette Sheridan auditioned for Bree, but following a disastrous audition, she was offered “the slut” part by Marc Cherry. Vanity Fair described Sheridan as “the once and future queen of prime-time soaps”, thanks to years on shows like Knots Landing and a slew of fabulously trashy TV movies with the word “Deadly” in most of their titles. Off-screen, she was known for having a varied love life, which included the likes of Harry Hamlin and Michael Bolton. Her last major partner had been arrested for trafficking ecstasy.

And the puppet-master of it all: Marc Cherry. Prior to DH, he had been struggling with a lack of work and a ton of debt accrued thanks to a dodgy agent. A gay Republican who got his start writing on The Golden Girls, Cherry positioned Desperate Housewives as a dark comedy akin to Six Feet Under, inspired by the likes of American Beauty and the classic women’s drama A Letter to Three Wives. His new agent repackaged it as a prime-time soap, keeping the dark mood but adding those big twists and sexy turns that hooked audiences. This was the big break to end all big breaks and he wasn’t about to let his stars spoil it.

But hey, we have an iconic cover shoot to complete, so shut up, Marc.

For those who don’t remember, the cover featured Hatcher, Sheridan, and Longoria on the front page, and Cross and Huffman on the foldout section. Longoria and Sheridan are centre, with the former lying own. “ABC’s mandatory stipulations included wardrobe requirements, specifically “no bathing suits.” And Team Desperate really got down to brass tacks on positioning, specifying that Hatcher was the one not to be in the center of any group photo.” So, this layout is actually a highly intricate way to soothe a handful of egos with clashing demands.

It was a speedy photoshoot, taking only seven hours where such a thing would usually encompass two days. Longoria arrived early. Many publicists gathered together: “ABC publicists, Touchstone publicists, personal publicists, assistant publicists, publicists manques. And the publicists were stirring and milling, rumbling and mumbling.” Nerves were raw. The SAG Awards and Golden Globes had come and gone, for the latter of which all except Longoria had been nominated and which Hatcher had won. A man known only as The Enabler is there, “brandishing ABC’s list of demands”, including that, “whatever you do, do not let Teri go to wardrobe first.”

But Hatcher got there first. Indeed, she had consulted with the shoot stylist a couple of days before. This is routine for such a shoot but The Enabler seems terrified by it. “I’m getting text messages from Eva. Everything is not fine,” he lamented. In fairness to him, he had to deal with a lot. Once Cross saw Hatcher in the red swimsuit she’d picked out, she “exploded.” Cross didn’t want to sit in the chair. Hatcher took it. Sheridan ended up in the middle. Huffman goes to the side.

For the individual shots, Cross was mad about her setup, which included her standing a topiary rendition of Michelangelo’s David. The vice president of television publicity announced, “Marcia will not come on-set if that penis is in the topiary.” They de-dicked David and she returned. Things had gotten so bad that Kevin Brockman, head of ABC publicity, was called in to settle things. As the piece notes, “It emerged later that this is the last group photo shoot the cast will ever do.” “My actors were fucking miserable all day,” declares The Enabler. “Finally, consensus” is how the piece ends.

Wow.

(Image via Vanity Fair.)

Again, pieces like this just do not happen very often in major publications like this. Writers, editors, and the EIC work overtime to ensure everyone is happy lest they lose coveted access. Vanity Fair really had to make the call to go all-in on the drama, knowing it was worth the hassle and potentially losing a lot of exclusivity with ABC/Disney. It would have been so easy for them to maybe hint at tensions but focus on the excitement of a hit show headlined by five fabulous women. But making this choice was also a moment for the magazine to stand with its team. Their photo crew and writer were treated shoddily in the midst of this diva drama. Zeman got great copy out of this but it sounds exhausting being in the middle of this ego-fest.

Stories of Desperate Drama permeated the show for its entire run. Sheridan left the series and sued Cherry for $20 million, claiming she was assaulted by Cherry on the set of the show and was then fired when she reported the alleged abuse to the network. She also alleged that Cherry was abusive to other cast members and writers. Her four former co-stars all came out in support of Cherry, although a Daily Beast piece from 2010 claimed that Cherry was “confrontational” and favoured his male writers over the women. When Huffman went to jail for the college admissions scandal, Longoria wrote a letter of support for her, heralding how Huffman stood up for her against the bullying she faced from an unnamed colleague who everyone assumed was Hatcher. When the show wrapped in 2012, it was reported that the crew received farewell gifts from the cast, but Hatcher was not involved. One of the show’s writers, Patty Lin, said that they were not to make eye contact with Hatcher and that Cherry was both sexist and racist.

Since then, the cast has spread its wings in varied ways. Longoria is a full-on businesswoman, producer, director, and owner of a football team, as well as the wife of one of the most powerful people in Latin media. Hatcher has laid low, sticking to voice work and TV roles. Sheridan was briefly on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, where she got into some off-air drama with Lisa Rinna, who married Sheridan’s ex. Huffman is out of jail and back on TV and the stage. Cross became an advocate for anal cancer awareness after her own diagnosis and has been outspoken in favour of Gaza and the rights of Palestinians during the genocide.

This cover has stood the test of time. I was inspired to cover this issue after seeing a People Magazine recreation of it, featuring the cast of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. They got all five on the same page, at least. I don’t think Andy Cohen’s reign of Bravo reality terror would have happened had Desperate Housewives not fuelled the fire for some of that dishy rich lady drama. The meta nature of that fictional show became the full text of a whole subgenre of modern entertainment.

Behind-the-scenes co-star warring didn’t go away either. See Sex and the City, The Good Wife, Glee, Two and a Half Men, NCIS, Grey’s Anatomy, Community, and too many others to count. Who would think that working in a high-stress environment with temperamental stars and a lot of money on the line would make for a toxic situation? Such circumstances are usually only fun to speculate about if there’s nothing bigger going on than bruised egos. Hell, if a genie offered me one wish, I’d probably use it to find out what went down between Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies on The Good Wife. I think there’s a sizeable portion of people who prefer their Hollywood vision to be one of petty squabbling and diva-dom. The stars: they’re (not) just like us!

Thanks for reading. You can find my other work scattered across the internet. Over on Pajiba, I talked about Mar-a-Lago Face, Gen Z’s love of cozy hobbies, a plea to make selling out embarrassing again, my love of ice hockey, and the endless “why is he still here” discourse surrounding Jared Leto.

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