‘Desperate Housewives’ Writer Reveals Upsetting Treatment She Received Behind the Scenes

Desperate Housewives was not always great behind-the-scenes. Via Fox News, writer Patty Lin detailed her experience on the ABC series in her new memoir, End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood. She claims that the writers weren’t encouraged to interact with any of the cast. Not only that, but she also says that she experienced “overt racism” from creator Marc Cherry. “The writers weren’t barred from the set, but we weren’t exactly welcome,” Lin writes. “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.”

“We were putting out schlock,” Lin continued. “The fact that it became the hottest show on TV, won multiple awards, ran for eight years, and earned more revenue than God still boggles my mind.” Lin was reportedly let go only after the first season, but it sounds like she still has a lot to say about her short time on the series. She also notes that Cherry said the staff “should go behind another writer’s back to ‘gang bang’ a script” after it was already assigned to another writer just for rewrites.

“With this wildly inefficient system, it’s a miracle that any episodes of Desperate Housewives ever got made,” Lin shared. “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.” The Breaking Bad producer didn’t stop there. She recalled how “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.”

With a whole book about her time in Hollywood, Patty Lin definitely has a lot more to say. Not only about her time on Desperate Housewives. Before retiring in 2008, she worked on Citizen Baines, Leap of Faith, Breaking Bad, ATF, Freaks and Geeks, and Friends. Just recently, Lin opened up about how the Friends just to have it rewritten if they didn’t like it. Getting more of an inside look at the real workings of a TV show, especially during the WGA strike, is definitely interesting. And it gives people a different perspective of Hollywood that is not widely known. End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood is available now.