"I'm finally bringing that character in. We're going to find out why he hasn't been around," Cherry said.

IT WASN'T EASY for Cherry to hear all the criticism of Season 2 of "Desperate Housewives," even though he knew a backlash would follow the hugely successful first season.

"I desperately care what everyone thinks," he said. "It's not fun to read articles where people say, 'You've failed and you've made Sunday nights a miserable place to be."'

But compared to when he was broke and out of work, it was not such a big deal. "People not liking the second season of your hit show — piece of cake. Borrowing $50,000 from your mother — not so easy," Cherry said. "So for me, I just put in perspective of going, 'This is part of the journey.'

"The truth is, none of it's going to last forever. And the cool thing for me, whenever I go to an awards show, I always look around and go, 'Yeah, this is going to come to an end. At some point, I'm not going to be invited to the party, so let me just enjoy it while I'm here."'

And, he said, he "learned some stuff" from Season 2 that has helped him with Season 3. "I'm really proud of this season. I'm hoping next season's even better. There's a couple things I haven't accomplished yet that I think we can really do. I think we can even dig deeper, so I still have goals ahead.

"But basically, it's just kind of, have a humble attitude towards the success. Once you start to believe that you deserve it, I think then you're really screwed."

CHERRY ALSO REALIZES that luck plays a huge part in the success of any TV series.

"So many of the successes we had the first season were completely flukelike and accidental," he said. Not the least of which was finding the perfect actress to play Gabrielle.

"I said to the casting directors, 'This should be pretty easy, because there aren't many people writing leads for Latino females,"' Cherry said. "And my casting director said, 'You want her to be gorgeous and to be able to act and do comedy. You're going to get three people auditioning.' And I went, 'Oh, that's encouraging.'

"And then I lucked out because one of them was Eva Longoria. And she was 5-foot-1 and she was about to play a runway model, but I went, 'Oh, I'll make it work.' I actually thought that was a compromise. I didn't know Eva Longoria would turn into Eva Longoria, so I completely lucked out."

---

E-mail: pierce@desnews.com