KEY POINTS:
Marc Cherry, creator of Desperate Housewives is a man of few secrets. "I just can't keep my mouth shut," he giggles, sitting in Lynette's living room on the Housewives set. Other people's secrets, too. "I can't believe I'm telling you this. My sister, at the age of 13, faked a suicide attempt."
Gee. Just the kind of thing you'd want your brother to tell the world. To make matters more public, Cherry wrote the incident into an episode of Desperate Housewives.
Confession isn't over yet. He goes on to tell how his oil-worker father "totally stunned and appalled my mother" by opening a pizza restaurant, and that it eventually broke up their marriage.
"I don't think I want to go through that again, so I probably won't have that break up Tom and Lynette's marriage," he says. "I'm just so thankful I have such a crazy family, because it really helps pay the bills now."
No kidding. Cherry is one of the most celebrated TV writers working in Hollywood. Despite Housewives suffering a dip in ratings in its second season - and getting many negative reviews - Cherry is positive things will be right as rain in season three. He means it - literally. The first episode opens with the usually sunny Wisteria Lane drenched in a downpour.
It's symbolic of the show's need for change after what has been a difficult year.
After a bumper first season that helped to coin the word "dramedy", Wisteria Lane became a surprisingly dark place, marred by murderous plotlines, emotional family fallouts and few scenes of the women together.
"After season one, I stumbled across the finish line and collapsed," Cherry says.
"Then, when I lifted my head, I went, 'Oh, I've got to do more of these?'
"I was not prepared for season two at all ... I was exhausted because I had written so much of the first season and physically and emotionally and spiritually, was not able to do it. But I started to get a handle on what I needed to fix."
He has a little help this year. Experienced comedy writers Jeff Greenstein (Will & Grace) and Emmy Award-winner Joe Keenan (Frasier) have joined the team.
Whereas last season Cherry's voice was diluted by the other scriptwriters, this year he has faith they "get" his tone.
"I'm trusting my writers more. I was very protective the first season ... Bree is based on my mother, so I literally wouldn't let anyone else write Bree.
"This year, we got Joe Keenan. He comes from an upper-middle-class, repressed Wasp family like I do, and I find him perfectly capable of writing Bree very well."
With the added comedy scribes in tow and Cherry's insisting that Eva Longoria (Gabrielle) has developed "amazing comedy chops", season three should be funnier.
The biggest storylines include Bree's marriage to the secretive and potentially dangerous Orson (Kyle Maclachlan), Susan's romantic kerfuffle after falling for another man while Mike is in a coma, Gabrielle and Carlos' War of the Roses-style break-up, and Lynette's dealing with the ramifications of Tom's lovechild.
One plot Cherry didn't see coming was Marcia Cross' pregnancy. He was excited for her when she told him - then his professional reaction kicked in: "Oh, crap". He decided not to write it into the show.
"She's going away for about five or six episodes. So we couldn't really do that to the audience - get her pregnant then send her away. We felt it was odd.
So at some point in her last couple of episodes, I think she's going to just be in bed. As the episodes progress, she'll start to carry more and more shopping bags."
A pregnant Bree might have been too much of a stretch for Cherry anyway, as the neurotic housewife is based on his mother.
Cherry is the first to admit his "interesting family history". He grew up in Orange County, California, the son of two conservative Baptists. His father worked for an oil company and relocated the family to Hong Kong in the 70s. In 1975 they moved to Iran.
"We were the oil brats. You know, we went to the same schools that the military brats went to."
In his last year at high school they moved to Thailand.
"So it's mostly suburbia," he quips, referring to the setting of Desperate Housewives, "but a little bit of international intrigue along the way".
That he based Bree "totally" on his mother might sound a little insensitive - she's certainly the most troubled of the housewives with her obsessive cleaning, strained family relationships and alcoholism.
But Cherry says his mother supports him. "Her attitude is, 'Whatever secrets you need to reveal to make yourself successful, you go ahead and do it.'
"She knows that ultimately the more successful I am, the better gifts she receives.
"We're actually a very loving family but there's some stuff there and I get to exorcise all those demons."
Cherry encountered more demons as a writer, after briefly considering embarking on an acting career. In 1990 he got a writing job on the long-running hit sitcom The Golden Girls, and worked on its short-lived spinoff, Golden Palace.
When it wrapped in the mid-90s he co-created The Five Mrs. Buchanans and The Crew. Then he created the sitcom, Some of My Best Friends on his own. None of them did well so he lived off his mother's money. "I was actually paralysed with fear after my writing partnership broke up in 1996, and I would put down about five sentences a day. Then, as the demands grew, I just started doing it. It's still an exhaustive process for me.
"It takes me probably about 20 or 30 per cent longer than other writers to do something because I'm so deeply analytical and a little bit of a perfectionist."
He broke out of his rut by analysing scripts by Woody Allen, William Inge and Aaron Sorkin.
It wasn't until a conversation with his mother in 2004 that Cherry was inspired to come up with Desperate Housewives, a show with the dark nuances of Twin Peaks and the glamour of Sex & the City.
But the major TV networks didn't want to know about it.
"I think I was perceived as such a loser that it didn't matter if the stuff on the page was good. I really had so much failure stench about me that it just pushed people away from the project. Also, it was something different, a soap. People were used to the Dallas/Dynasty soap opera, but I went back to the soap opera's roots, which had to do about women, but then I added humour to it."
Even when ABC picked it up and the show became a hit, Cherry couldn't shake off his professional insecurities.
"And then someone said, 'Well, you're Marc Cherry.' That was an odd thing because I just identified myself so much with unemployment, it occurred to me that my identity had changed."
His identity is still changing, he says. But, at 46, he finally feels like an adult. He has learned to be an executive producer and to delegate, rather than agonise over a script for hours.
Life behind the scenes of Wisteria Lane has become a well-oiled machine. The team now does four or five script polishes, more than double what they used to. But Cherry is still hands-on, says Felicity Huffman (Lynette).
"He's really available. If you don't understand a scene, you can always get him on the phone."
He also has more energy, more ideas, more ambition, even if he's not sure what to do with it.
"I feel like I've done the TV show thing. I'm the least capable guy in terms of people like David E. Kelly and Aaron Sorkin.
"They amaze me because they just do so much writing, and they do it for years and years and years.
"It takes a lot out of me. So I want to go write for theatre, where I can take about a year to write that two-hour script as opposed to a week. I think that my temperament is far more suited for that.
"Also, TV is changing so much. I kind of feel like I caught the last hit out of Boston. I'm like, this is good and I'm happy to have this but I can't wait for that next part of my career."
* Desperate Housewives, season three, Monday, 8.30pm, TV2
