‘Desperate Housewives’ Writer Alleges in New Book that Staff Wasn’t ‘Welcome on Set’
According to former Desperate Housewives writer Patty Lin, there was just as much drama in the writers room as there was on Wisteria Lane. https://t.co/pjsWdU4fgj
- Us Weekly (@usweekly) August 29, 2023
According to former Desperate Housewives writer Patty Lin, there was just as much drama in the writers room as there was on Wisteria Lane. Lin detailed her stint working for the ABC drama in her new book.
"The writers weren’t barred from the set, but we weren’t exactly welcome. Usually we’d only see the cast at table reads, where we’d sit quietly in the back and try not to make eye contact with Teri Hatcher,"
Lin worked on the first season and alleged that she experienced “overt racism” at the hands of Cherry.
She was let go after ABC picked up the back nine episodes of season 1.
"One day at lunch, the topic of Margaret Cho came up, and someone mentioned All-American Girl, Cho’s short-lived sitcom about a Korean American family. Marc turned to me and said, ‘Patty, you should write a show like that.’ I love Margaret Cho, but please don’t lump us together just because we’re both Asian women in show business,”
Lin was among several writers on staff given “busy work of writing the marginally funny material” as Cherry and his “loyal team” of two other writers helmed most of the scripts. When another writer was assigned a script, Cherry once declared the staff needed to “gang bang” the draft without the knowledge of the original writer.
“With this wildly inefficient system, it’s a miracle that any episodes of Desperate Housewives ever got made. The quality that had attracted me to the pilot - the dark humor - was lost in the slapdash, assembly-line approach to what was supposed to be a creative process,”
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