"Desperate Housewives," My Favorite Guilty Pleasure, if, That Is, I Actually Felt Guilty about Watching It--Which I Don't

Interviewed at his office, Mr. Cherry recalled sitting with his mother at her home in Orange County watching the news coverage of the 2002 trial of Andrea Yates, who was found guilty of drowning her five children in a bathtub.

"I was horrified by this," Mr. Cherry said [creator and writer of the show]. "I turned to her and said, 'Gosh, can you imagine a woman so desperate that she would hurt her own children?' My mother took her cigarette out of her mouth and said, 'I've been there.'..."

So had my mother. She had four sons under five to raise while her husband was away in Vietnam. Back then, she was desperate enough to hurt us almost every day.

Actually, she was only desperate for the first couple of months. After that, after she'd developed a taste for the hurting, she did it for sport.