20 Years After Desperate Housewives, Wisteria Lane Remains a Suburban Legend

In the ’50s, the sitcom Leave It to Beaver fashioned its matriarch June Cleaver as the archetypally ideal American housewife. Viewers could expect to find her cooking up a roast in the kitchen, practicing her needlepoint, or arranging tea roses, never a hair out of place. About a half century later, a group of women made themselves at home on the very same street to showcase a darker side of suburban domestic bliss.

Desperate Housewives was filmed on Universal Studios’ Colonial Street backlot set, where productions including Leave It to Beaver, the 1989 Tom Hanks movie The ’Burbs, and scenes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer were also shot. The ABC soap set out to explore the question: What really goes on behind those white picket fences and picture-perfect façades of American suburbia? Audiences at home were intrigued enough by the concept to go with the series on a 180-episode journey to find out, a run that left an indelible mark on the television landscape. Bravo kingpin Andy Cohen acknowledges that his blockbuster Real Housewives reality franchise is a direct descendant of the comedy-drama. “At the time, Desperate Housewives was a huge hit on ABC. [Producer Scott Dunlop’s] big idea was to bring Desperate Housewives to life,” he told The Hollywood Reporter of The Real Housewives of Orange County’s genesis.

Marc Cherry suspected the idea held massive untapped potential long before he proved it as Desperate Housewives’ creator and showrunner. The former Golden Girls writer, who was spending some time at home in Orange County as he hunted for a new TV show concept, found himself following the 2002 filicide trial of Andrea Yates. “This was a woman who had drowned all her children in a bathtub in Texas, and I was watching this, horrified as anyone would be,” Cherry tells AD. “I said to my mother, ‘Gosh, can you imagine some woman being so desperate that she would hurt her own children?’ My mom took her cigarette out of her mouth and said, ‘I’ve been there.’ And she started, for the very first time in my life, telling me stories about how alone and desperate she had felt while my father was off getting his master’s degree; he had left her alone five days out of the week with three small children…. And that’s how the idea occurred. I came up with the title Desperate Housewives almost immediately.”

The world the women lived in, Cherry decided, needed to appear uncannily picturesque almost to the point of a Stepford-like simulacrum. “We really have to sell the sweetness of the street. It better be a little over-the-top pleasant because there’s going to be so many dark, dastardly things going on,” he remembers thinking, noting that Edward Scissorhands, with its dreamlike suburbia saturated in punchy pastels, was among the references that loomed largest over the Anytown, USA, they set the series in: Fairview.

“I followed The Simpsons model; I never identified the state that Fairview was in. There’s something like 30 states in America that have a town called Fairview,” Cherry says. “I never wanted to choose a blue state or a red state, I wanted it to be in the suburbia of everyone’s mind. If you see a license plate on the car, it says ‘The Eagle State.’”

But the name that really stuck with fans was the cul-de-sac’s. Cherry thought Wisteria Lane sounded evocative and beautiful, and the plant set an idyllic storybook scene draped over doorways and threaded through trellises on the set. The lilac vining bloom scored him some bonus points with critics, albeit unintentional; known for its striking appearance yet lethally invasive root structure, the choice to dub the ladies’ lane Wisteria was interpreted as commentary on the nefarious motivations beheld by a beautiful cast of women focused on keeping up appearances.

And in a neighborhood where a poorly manicured lawn might be read as a deeper character flaw, pristine landscaping was essential. Production designer Thomas Walsh tells AD that there was “a huge amount of maintenance, greens-wise”—even for the fake stuff. Most of the flowering plants were silk, which Walsh says had to be changed out annually as the UV factor in sunny California has a way of degrading the chromatic value in artificial plants.

The cul-de-sac, having hosted myriad productions of all genres over the decades, initially looked less like a mid-to-high-income enclave and more like a Franken-set before Walsh and the team got to work. “It was kind of a Whitman’s Sampler of all sorts of different types of architecture, from Victorian to midcentury, this and that. It was a real muddled mess,” he says. Extensive termite damage to some of the structures, he recalls, didn’t help matters. But a robust budget to produce the pilot made it possible to work some magic in three weeks’ time.

Most of the show’s homes sport decent sized porches, which were fitting features both for the charming upper-middle-class suburban atmosphere as well as for visual storytelling functionality. “From these front yards and porches, you could see into three other homes, so it was perfect for our purposes,” says Walsh, adding that the 1954 thriller Rear Window was one of the major influences on his concept for the Desperate Housewives sets. “It was really about the lack of privacy in the suburban community: Everybody knows what everybody else is up to, which is where Rear Window resonated because on those iconic sets—all on a stage—from one window, you could see into the worlds of seven others.”

While some of the interiors of Wisteria Lane were built on a separate sound stage set, others were accessible straight from their façades on Colonial Street, like Susan’s kitchen and part of the Solis living area. The dwellings’ exteriors shared some similarities, so the team looked to define and differentiate their characters inside the homes. “That was all about what their individual tastes might be,” Cherry says, explaining that they sought to imbue an upper-middle-class elegance to Martha Stewart type Bree’s abode, a “sexy, yuppie” vibe for the moneyed former model Gaby, a simple and feminine style for hopeless romantic single mother Susan, and a chaotic all-American family feel for frazzled mom-of-four Lynette.

Color palettes unique to each character also helped to set the women apart. For example, Gaby’s world was defined by warm tans and peaches, whereas Lynette’s was characterized by baby blues and pinks. Walsh notes that the tonal distinction, which was also factored in by the costuming team, was especially critical with six or so intercut narrative threads to follow on any given episode. Walsh hoped that identifiable color stories helped provide “an instant memory” for audiences to change gears unconsciously when jumping from plot to plot.

Sometimes said plot dictated the curation of domestic perfection, other times the script called for making a mess. Wisteria Lane faced down a number of disasters (some natural, some otherwise) but among the most memorable were a plane crash, a devastating tornado, and a house fire, as well as a second house fire—Edie’s revenge inferno meant as payback for the first one. “Everything was controlled by propane tanks, so all the fire jets are carefully placed in position and controlled by special effects technicians so they can dial it up, down, off and on,” Walsh says of the fire scenes.

As for the twister, “to see the back lots strewn with wreckage was one of my favorite shots we ever did,” Cherry recalls fondly. Walsh explains that the process was more considered than simply busting up the sets and tossing pieces of it everywhere. “For a couple of weeks on another part of the studio, we were creating tons of pallets of a debris and discard. The street is also a fire lane, and should there be an emergency, it needs to be instantly cleared, so all the debris on the street were attached to pallets that could be moved with a forklift in rapid succession,” he says. The end result was appropriately excessive. “It was just everywhere and this was over the top, I confess. But this is also Desperate Housewives, so my feeling is that you can’t be too conservative.”

Certainly, it was the show’s big leaps and more daring moves that kept viewers enthralled over its eight seasons. The influence of the series can be seen all over the small screen to this day, where programming like the Real Housewives and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives seek to deliver that same domestic drama via reality TV vehicles, and the street itself lives on too. “When [the set] is used for commercials or in a movie, I can tell just by the backdrop—after shooting there for eight years—‘Oh, they’re on my street!’” And it does belong to him and the Desperate Housewives team in a way, no matter what goes on to shoot there; after countless productions over 50 years of filming on the suburban set, Colonial Street was officially renamed Wisteria Lane.

All episodes of Desperate Housewives are available to stream on Hulu.