Desperation winner

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — That "Desperate Housewives" is the biggest new hit of the season and the hottest TV show to come along in years is not in doubt. How it happened is the question.

Heck, Hollywood can't even figure out what "Desperate Housewives" is. The show won a People's Choice Award as the best new drama and a Golden Globe as the best comedy.

"The truth is that any of these categories is uncomfortable because none of them truly embraces what our show is, which is a really interesting mixture of a bunch of tonalities — mystery, comedy, drama," said creator/executive producer Marc Cherry. "We have a lot of different things going on."

A lot of different things that combined to make a huge, rather unexpected hit. "I was pretty darn surprised, having produced some huge flops," Cherry said. "As for the reasons, they're myriad. I mean, for anything to have this kind of success, you need to hit a bunch of categories."

Cherry was quick to credit ABC for promoting "the heck out of" the show and giving it "the perfect time slot." (Although, honestly, going in it didn't seem so perfect.) But at the top of the list of what made "Housewives" work is that the show is so funny.

Yes, it began with the suicide of one of the housewives on Wisteria Lane, Mary Alice (Brenda Strong, who continues to narrate the series), and there's a big, creepy mystery surrounding that. But seemingly every plotline and all the mysteries are loaded with humor. Slapstick, wordplay, sight gags, sarcasm . . . if it's funny, it's happening. "America will embrace something that's funny," Cherry said.

At a time when sitcoms are struggling, an out-of-work sitcom writer ("Golden Girls," "Five Mrs. Buchanans") re-energized comedy in the form of an hourlong soap opera of sorts. "I approached this kind of more as a sitcom in terms of, I wanted short, fun scenes," Cherry said. "Every week we always had more plot than we know what to do with and we're always trying to cram it in. So it's evolved, a little unbeknownst to me, as this incredibly fast-paced thing. You don't like one scene or one storyline, well, another one is coming right after it."

Steve McPherson, who bought the script when he was running Buena Vista TV studios and put it on the air after he became ABC's chief programmer, pointed to the "amazing casting" — mostly familiar faces, such as Teri Hatcher, Marcia Cross, Felicity Huffman, Nicollette Sheridan, and some lesser-knowns, like Eva Longoria.