Desperate Housewives
Trivia
The original pilot featured Sheryl Lee as Mary Alice Young, Michael Reilly Burke as Rex Van De Camp and Kyle Searles as John. Lee was later replaced with Brenda Strong, Reilly with Steven Culp and Searles with Jesse Metcalfe, and their scenes were re-shot for the broadcast pilot.
The show's creators replaced Sheryl Lee because they felt her voice-over narration needed "more of a comic lift" and "somebody more present and less ethereal". However, they still hope to bring Lee back to the show in a future guest spot.
Wisteria Lane includes houses used numerous times throughout the years. Their names include the "Hardy Boys House", the "Leave it to Beaver House", the "Providence House", and the "Animal House". It has been incorrectly thought that these houses were the original neighborhood for "Leave it to Beaver". But this is impossible as the houses aren't anywhere near where they once stood in the 1950s. They have been moved and re-arranged and even destroyed and re-built numerous times since they were first bought by the city of Los Angeles which was going to destroy them to make way for Dodger Stadium.
Creator Marc Cherry said he got the idea to write the pilot after a conversation with his mother. She told him that raising Cherry and his siblings with their father away most of the time made her feel "desperate" sometimes.
At first, the show was pitched as a female driven comedy. All the networks turned it down. It was then slightly rewritten and pitched as a nighttime soap opera and it sold.
In the Episode, "Anything You Can Do" Lynette's husband is pitching a sale on how to advertise a product to his clients and they are not very interested in his idea. Lynette suggests advertising on dry-cleaning bags because "they sit in your closet for months and are constant advertising". The clients loved her idea. To promote this show, ABC did just this, putting the slogan "Everyone has a little dirty laundry" on thousands of bags.
Teri Hatcher broke two ribs filming the scene where she stumbles into a wedding cake and insisted they not stop production.
Originally started off as a comedy pilot, and was rejected by every network including Lifetime and HBO. ABC expressed an interested, and it was retooled to its current format of a dark comedy/drama.
Continuity: In "Anything You Can Do" (Episode: #1.7), Andrew runs down MaMa, and is seen from Gabrielles' house moving from left to right - headed down the street to "his house" - when he should have been driving by right to left. All other episodes show that the Van De Kamps' live across the street and to the left of Gabrielle.
Continuity: In "Your Fault" Episode: #1.13, Rodney puts butter on his plate but when it cuts back to the plate the butter is missing.
Continuity: In the first aired episode, the women are all standing in front of Edie's burning house. As Bree turns to her husband, Rex, it is actually the actor who played Rex in the unaired pilot (Michael Rielly Burke) and not the actor who replaced him (Steven Culp).