BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — The actresses on "Desperate Housewives" insist that it doesn't bother them a bit that the show's narrative suddenly jumped forward five years in the final moments of May's fourth-season finale. Or that it's going to stay five years forward when the fifth season begins on Sunday (8 p.m., ABC/Ch. 4).

After all, if creator/executive producer Marc Cherry had gone with his first inclination, the show would have jumped ahead even further.

"I was thinking seven years, but then my writing staff was, like, 'Well, you know, do you want to go in there and tell all those women they're going to be seven years older?' And I went, 'Yeah, five is good."'

Yeah, well, it was a little more involved than that.

"We talked him down from seven," said executive producer Bob Daily. "We countered with three and ended up with five, eventually."

As for the actresses — Teri Hatcher (Susan), Felicity Huffman (Lynette), Marcia Cross (Bree), Eva Longoria Parker (Gabrielle), Nicollette Sheridan (Edie) and Dana Delany (Katherine) — they unanimously declared The Great Leap Forward a "great" idea.

"I think once I explained to them that I wasn't going to put wrinkles on them, that they were basically going to look like this, it was fine," Cherry said as the actresses nodded in agreement. "And I think everyone was mostly just interested in the stories we were going to be telling so that was that."

Cherry said the time jump was a way to "reset" after four seasons of serialized comedy/drama.

"The soap tends to build up. I wanted to get back to where we were that very first season where it's just the problems of some ordinary women and they were small and relatable.... I thought, 'How am I going to do that? And I thought, 'Oh. Let's just go forward in time. Let me change everyone's lives completely."'

We got a good look in those final scenes last May. Lynette is struggling with teenagers; Bree has her own business; Katherine is working for Bree; Edie is back on Wisteria Lane after a five-year absence with a new husband in tow; Gabrielle is a frazzled housewife with two young daughters; and Susan has a new man in her life.

There's a lot of information about how they've gotten where they are in Sunday's episode, as well as the episode that airs a week later. But I won't give any of it away here.

And the changes are not just cosmetic. Hatcher said that any physical changes to the characters are "motivated by some sort of real emotional, situational thing that's happened. It's not like arbitrarily somebody just went, 'Hey, I want to wear a different kind of dress.' It all means something."