Key actors from the show lent their likenesses for "Desperate Housewives: The Game," while actress Brenda Strong provided the same spooky narration she delivers on the TV series. In the game, players assume the role of a new female neighbor that moves into the neighborhood. She interacts with the characters from the series to solve a new mystery. "When you are writing a video game, you are both trying to lead the player in the direction of the solution to the mystery," says Tobis, who also has worked on the "Housewives" TV series. "Over the course of the game, you're also trying to lead them astray to have fun, allowing them to mingle with the characters from the show."

Like many TV scribes, Tobis says that he tends to overwrite his scripts. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that video games are one medium where length is not a problem. "Video game writing takes a very different path than traditional entertainment because you want to lead the audience to a solution, but you deviate by offering a lot of different paths," Tobis says. "It's a bit like creating a family tree, or more accurately, a spread sheet."

The intricacy and depth of storytelling found in some contemporary games reflects the influence of a new generation of writers like Tobis, who move freely from penning film and TV projects to games.

"The game developers are starting to understand that the dialogue in games can't be the kind of dialogue that existed 10 years ago," Tobis says. "It's important to the future of gaming. Writers of video games, and some of them may come from Silicon Valley rather than Hollywood, are bringing a new level of sophistication and complexity to games."

"Yes, we're trying some new stuff," Cherry tells the Associated Press. "Some of it might work. Some of it might not. This, of course, is the nature of episodic television. They can't all be gems."

This season, all the critics seem to be finding are zircons. "The writers seem to be drawing some of the characters too broadly," squawked USA Today, while New York's Daily News complained, "The show still doesn't seem to have any traction. Even the twists aren't as twisted as they used to be."

*****

Perhaps the problem, the critics suggested, is that Cherry has yet to write any of this season's episodes. (They also complain that there has been no subplot or even scenes in which the housewives are linked.) But Cherry – who's been signed as a co-executive-producer of a humorous new murder-mystery series to be called Kill/Switch – calls the critics' claim "patently untrue. ... I am as involved in the writing process as I've ever been. I help come up with the story lines, I give notes and, indeed, I rewrite things constantly. I take the credit and the blame for everything that goes on the screen," he says.

Furthermore, "I'm paying attention to my audience's response and am trying my darnedest to please them," he insists. "And I will continue to do so as long as I've got that executive producer credit above my name."