It all started with someone’s mama.
“Desperate Housewives” creator Marc Cherry was watching TV with his mother one night a few years ago when a news report came on about the Andrea Yates case. After several minutes spent absorbing the latest tragic twists and turns in the saga of the woman who drowned five of her children in a bathtub, Cherry recalls, “I said, ‘Gosh, can you imagine a woman being so desperate that she would hurt her own children?’ “
Yes, said Martha Cherry, who discussed her often frustrating years raising three kids.
Well, where’s television been all this time?
Not giving us a full picture of motherhood, that’s where. Although one look at “Desperate Housewives” and the rest of the fall TV schedule suggests that’s all about to change.
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It’s undeniably clear that mothers are in vogue, indispensable and definitely not boring this season.
“It’s kind of in the zeitgeist now,” says Thomas Schlamme about the current focus on moms in series such as the WB’s “Jack & Bobby,” which he executive produces and where his real-life wife, Oscar-winner Christine Lahti, plays a mother more powerful and unpredictable than Mother Nature herself. “I think we’re all interested in complicated characters on TV.”
Complicated–and almost too numerous to count–are this fall’s slate of mothers.
“It’s such a pleasure to play a more dimensional adult,” says Lisa Darr, who’s a mother with a life as complicated and secretive in some ways as her teen son’s on ABC’s “life as we know it.” TV is finally catching up with the real world.
“There’s one way to be a mother, and that’s basically to go, ‘I find it so fulfilling, and I’ve never wanted anything else, and I love it,’ ” says Felicity Huffman, who stars in “Desperate Housewives.” “And if you do anything that diverges from that, you’re considered a bad mother. I didn’t know this existed until I became a mother, and the pressure is phenomenal.”
Fox’s “The O.C.” (returning Nov. 4), which–despite its glossy teen-show overtones–really gets interesting when its adult characters struggle to make sense of everything from their marriage and kids to job reversals. “I think Julie [Cooper] is just trying to survive,” Melinda Clarke says almost empathetically about her “O.C.” character. “I think these people exist, absolutely. Maybe we all have a little bit of [complicated] mother in us, and TV gives rein to that.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Molly Marinik ([email protected])