Housewives in Hovercrafts: An Interview With Desperate Housewives Writer/Producer Jeff Greenstein - Page 3

"In real life, you would never buy the Young house," he laughed.

Gambling on Change: "Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't."

With each new season comes a new central mystery for the show and often new cast members. From casting news, we know some of the older children are disappearing as regular characters. The upcoming season will see new kids on the block as Lynette's are recast and Gaby's added, plus Gale Harold plays the mystery man locking lips with Susan and Neal McDonough has joined the cast as Edie's new man, presumably part of the season's mystery. Greenstein, not shockingly, didn't open up about those specifics, and he shrugged off the suggestion that the show takes greater risks because of them.

"Any time you put a mark on a canvas you take a risk," he pointed out. "We're always trying to challenge ourselves creatively and push ourselves to go someplace we haven't been before and add voices we haven't heard before, and there's always risks involved."

Even when a creative choice doesn't work as well as hoped, Greenstein sees television as an ideal medium for risk-taking. "The fun of being on a series as opposed to a movie is you get many shots at it. You have the fun of evolving choices over time."

He used the example of last season's mystery, which revolved around Katherine Mayfair and her family, as a particularly successful gamble. "We were betting the season on whoever we cast in that role," Greenstein recalled. "Fortunately we cast Dana Delany and she was absolutely spectacular. We bet the season on her and we won."

The Writing Process: "There's a lot of advance planning."

The plan was always to have the women close ranks around Katherine in the finale, though Greenstein says they were also fortunate that she and her character were embraced so wholeheartedly, and that Delany was willing to return for the upcoming season. "There's always a delicate chemistry in a show that's been running this long, so to bring someone in who fits in so well creatively and as a person is really lovely."

As usual, the writers already know where season five will end up and at least the broad strokes of how they'll get there. "We're very rigorous about figuring out the arc of the season's mystery, but there's always room for surprises. It may be that things you thought were going to work don't, and other things work better than anticipated. Sometimes you speed up or slow down your plotting to accommodate that."

"There's a small group of us that arcs the season and breaks the stories," he explained, offering a verbal peek into the series' writing process. "Then we send one or two writers off to write a story, they bring them back to us, we give them notes, they do rewrites and then we do a final polish of it in the room, the way a sitcom does. It's a very idiosyncratic process. It's sort of a hybrid of the half-hour process and the hour process. Because it's sort of a comedy and it's sort of a serial drama and it's sort of a soap, it has a lot of the greatest hits of the processes you use to make those kinds of shows."

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

Diane writes about boring things by day, pop culture things by night. She also runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news about Canadian television. Follow her on Twitter @deekayw for more random thoughts.

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