Familiar Face on Wisteria Lane

On the bustling Wisteria Lane, the famous street on a Universal back lot where facades have grown into working homes to shoot in, the colors becoming more vivid and the wisteria intensely in bloom on the porches, a new neighbor was settling in.

Vanessa Williams was meeting the press for the first time as a cast member of “Desperate Housewives.

She’ll play the newly moved-in Renee Filmore-Jones on the show’s seventh season this fall. It comes after her five season run on “Ugly Betty” as the tyrannical Wilhelmina Slater.

“They wanted me to play to my strengths and stir stuff up,” Williams says.

Still, Williams says the approach will be different. “This is a suburban story. They didn’t want me to use an accent and the dress and approach were more suburban.”

But she agreed with “Desperate Housewives” creator Marc Cherry that she couldn’t just be her old dragon lady character one more time.

“Marc made sure there was a strict delineation between Wilhelmina and Renee.”

For his part, Cherry says “I’m thrilled as all get-out to have Vanessa on the cast,” though he admits the idea came from ABC entertainment chief Stephen McPherson, pointing out that Williams was just out of work after the cancellation of “Ugly Betty.”

“I at firs was skeptical, with her coming off another ABC show,” Cherry says. But Williams “just got the tonality of the show.”

“I knew she was able to do wicked comedy based on ‘Ugly Betty,’” Cherry says. “I was convinced amazingly quickly.”

He met with her while she was on Broadway with Sondheim project and it was announced days later at the network upfronts.

Her character, living in Edie Britt’s old house, is “the wife of a professional athlete who also happens to have been “Lynette’s best freinemy from college,” a connection Chery sais brings “some of the best bitchy dialog ever heard.”

That she’s married to professional athlete is much like Eva Longoria, who plays  Gabrielle Solis. “Marc takes a lot of his favorite ideas from my private life,” Longoria chirped.

“They have a lot of marital problems,” Cherry says.

“No!” Longoria says, negating her earlier statement.

Williams will bring money, glamour and style to the street that always seems to expand and change. New too this season will be a character played by Lanie Kazan, who approached Cherry at a party and said “You know what you need on Wisteria Lane? A Jew!”

The new season begins with the ramifications of finding out that it was Bree’s son who was involved in the hit and run accident earlier in the show. And in episode two, Cherry says, it starts right over again with “another hit and run involving both families.”

Cherry seemed to step back from his vow to end the show after another two seasons, suggesting that the show could go on without him in such an active role, though he says he’ll always have his hand in it. Taking some of his time these days is writing  the pilot for a new show, a process he called “exciting and terrifying.”