Desperate Housewives [1] made one of the TV season's bolder moves in its finale, rocketing five years into the future [2] and finding the ladies of Wisteria Lane with all-new problems (and, in some cases, all-new relationships). On Thursday, show creator Marc Cherry and the show's main cast took the stage at the TCA press tour [3] to tease a little of what we can expect to see in season five. To see what Cherry and the ladies had to say, just .

• How the five-year time jump came to be: Series creator Marc Cherry was at a baseball game with ABC Entertainment President Steve McPherson sometime after Lost [4]'s crazy flash-forward third-season finale. He told McPherson he wanted to create a similar "bold stroke" for his show — and he also wanted to pare down the soapy drama and have the housewives dealing with smaller, more relatable problems. That's where the idea came to simply jump the show ahead, restarting a few years down the line.
• Where we'll find the ladies: Bree "is going to get out of the house with her muffins — but at least she's getting out of the house!" Marcia Cross said. She's basically Martha Stewart at the dawn of her career. Lynette has juvenile delinquent sons, and Gaby is now a decidedly unglamorous mother of two. But we saw all of that in the season finale. Most interesting to me is that Susan — who was once so open with her emotions — is now closed off to love for reasons we'll discover over the course of the season.
• And what of Edie? "Edie will come back to Wisteria Lane in a very exciting way," Cherry said (but, of course, would offer no more).



• Gaby without the glamour? Eva Longoria Parker said she's loving playing a dressed-down (and slightly fattened up) Gaby, with a new, shorter "mom haircut" and extra padding all over. It may be short-lived, though; Cherry said we're likely to see Gaby looking fancy again by midseason.
• Who's Susan's new man? Cherry described him as "kind of an interesting, artsy guy" who will be very different from the other men in her life and will present her with all-new challenges — "including the fact that she kind of doesn't even really want to be in a relationship."
• So, what happened anyway? The idea is that we'll find out what happened in the intervening five years in bits and pieces over the course of the season, with some flashbacks and some storylines built around revealing what happened.

No matter where the story goes, we should enjoy it while we can: Cherry wants to end his show after seven years, which means just three more trips down Wisteria Lane.

Source [5]