Politics & Power Quote by Marc Cherry

Cherry is selling suburbia as both aspiration and trap, and the genius is how he refuses to choose. The phrase "the very best of American values" arrives polished and ceremonial, like a realtor’s brochure: community, safety, civility, the whole Norman Rockwell starter kit. Then he slips in "fun backdrop" and you can feel the camera tilt. This isn’t reverence; it’s set dressing.

The intent is openly televisual. Cherry is describing a stage where brightness does the work of concealment. A "beautiful neighborhood" isn’t just scenery; it’s a social technology. When everything looks orderly, suspicion feels impolite. That’s why the darkness has to be "deliciously sneaky" rather than simply criminal. The adjective "deliciously" gives the game away: the audience is invited to enjoy the transgression, not merely judge it. We’re meant to taste the hypocrisy.

The subtext is a critique of the American performance of virtue. Cherry’s suburbia runs on status maintenance: curated lawns, curated marriages, curated morality. The darker stuff isn’t imported from outside; it’s produced by the pressure to appear fine. The more a place "represents" values, the more those values become props people manipulate.

Context matters, too. As the creator of Desperate Housewives, Cherry helped define an early-2000s TV mode where domesticity becomes noir: sunlight, pastel paint, and secrets under the laminate. Post-9/11 culture leaned hard into "normal life" as comfort, and Cherry’s twist was to show how normal can be weaponized as camouflage - and why that makes for irresistible, slightly guilty entertainment.