At some point during season seven this woman decided she would no longer speak to her fellow cast members.” “Everyone tried their darnedest to get along with this woman over the course of the show. She was a big star with some big behavioral problems,” he wrote. “We had a problematic cast member on my show. Felicity could feel that I was riddled with anxiety even though I never complained or mentioned the abuse to anyone.”Ĭherry had chimed in, too, of course, noting a ‘problematic cast member’ who, even as she refused to speak to the rest of the cast, Huffman still greeted ‘good morning’ every day. “Until one day, Felicity told the bully ‘enough’ and it all stopped. “I dreaded the days I had to work with that person because it was pure torture,” Eva had written. When Huffman was set to be sentenced after her involvement in the college admission scandal early this year, her co-star and longtime friend Longoria wrote a letter of support, revealing that an unnamed Housewives actor had started to bully her, and Huffman came to the rescue. Towards the show’s latter years, as social media became a hotter and hotter thing, Teri was suspiciously absent from many behind-the-scenes ‘grams and tweetpics posted by Huffman, Longoria, and Cross. The showrunner had fired back, revealing that during the series’ first season, he had to intervene in a fight between Nicollette and Teri. In 2012, Sheridan sued Cherry and ABC for wrongful termination and assault. Something about Teri and not getting to get first dibs on the swimsuit she would wear, Marcia walking out, et cetera, et cetera. In 2005, Vanity Fair placed the main cast-from Felicity Huffman, to Eva Longoria, to Marcia Cross, Teri Hatcher, and Nicollette Sheridan-on its cover, and apparently, tensions on set had been high. To date, Housewives is still the longest-running primetime television show that features an all-female cast, with Charmed and Pretty Little Liars coming in at number two and number three, and it didn’t survive eight whole seasons without a tiff (or two or three or four) between the show’s leads. ( Reading ‘Desperate Housewives’: Beyond the White Picket Fence, edited by Janet McCabe, may or may not have been used by the author as a reference while writing her undergraduate thesis.) There were dolls, there were games (there are still games-as of writing, Desperate Housewives: The Game is still available for download on the App Store), there were coffee table books, there were scholarly works. It became a regular at the Emmys, the Golden Globes, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards, winning 71 out of 273 nominations across various award shows, including GLAAD and NAACP (although one could argue that its queer and POC representation leaves much to be desired). By 2006, Desperate Housewives was a pop culture staple. Disparate, yet somehow making complete sense. Cherry had initially compared it to American Beauty, and critics affirmed this in various news sites, continuing to compare it to four completely disparate pieces of media- Knots Landing, The Golden Girls, Sex and the City, and Twin Peaks. 21.3 million viewers tuned in, and critics could not get enough of it. Marc Cherry’s soapy, campy opus, inspired by the trial of Andrea Yates, the Texan mother who confessed to drowning all five of her children in a bathtub in 2001, was ABC’s biggest success in 2004 and beyond. There was no lack of bewildering and baffling storylines in Desperate Housewives’ eight-year run, but amidst the campiness and extravagance of every episode-all of which were named for a Sondheim song or lyric-hid genuine, tender moments between its four main characters, Gaby Solis, Susan Mayer, Bree Van de Kamp, and Lynette Scavo. And a million other things too: fingers getting chopped off, ashes getting thrown in one’s face, a tornado, a plane crash, a sex offender next door. Housewives had it all: a model having a steamy affair with a young gardener, a harried mother taking her sons’ ADHD medication to keep up with the demands of parenting, a Republican housewife having to deal with the fact that her son is gay, and the girl-next-door falling head-over-heels- literally-for her hot plumber neighbor. Of course, that was the last time that street would ever be quiet. It was a pilot like no other-daytime soapiness disturbing the prestige of primetime television with Mary Alice’s death, the suicide that launched a thousand unravelling secrets in the quiet neighborhood of Wisteria Lane. This week, 15 years ago, Desperate Housewives aired.
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