No one left for Edie to sleep with

Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry testified Wednesday that he killed off Wisteria Lane seductress Edie Britt in the fifth season because there were simply no more male characters for her to bed. “We had played out as many romantic complications with each of the women’s husbands” as possible, Cherry told a Los Angeles jury in a wrongful termination suit brought by Nicollette Sheridan, the actress who played Edie. Sheridan alleges that Cherry eliminated her character as an act of retaliation after she complained that he had struck her in the head during an on-set dispute over dialogue. In his testimony, Cherry said he had toyed with plotting Edie’s de- mise for years, even going so far as to seek approval from the show’s studio, Touchstone, and its network, ABC, in the third season. That request was denied by executives who worried she was too important to the show, he said. He proposed her death again two years later as a way to spice up a show with declining ratings, he said. Cherry said unprofessional behaviour by Sheridan was a secondary consideration in writing her off the show, including insulting comments during read-throughs of the script and forgetting her lines. Los Angeles Times