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Two Hit Shows Where the Sets Are as Expressive As the Characters

LOS ANGELES

A new television season is upon us, and with it, another opportunity to see how people in Hollywood imagine that we Americans really live -- or how we'd like to.

As the crow flies -- or in this car-dependent city, as it drives -- it's only a couple of miles from Wisteria Lane to Star's Hollow, the two locales at the heart, respectively, of ABC's "Desperate Housewives" and the WB network's "Gilmore Girls." Both communities can be found on studio back lots perched just above the congested 101 Freeway, on decades-old sets that have been recycled for movies and TV shows ranging from "The Music Man" to "The Munsters." Each week, millions of viewers tune in to both of these newer programs not only to see what their favorite characters are up to, but also to take in two distinct and meticulously conceived visions of community.

Ever since TV's earliest days, shows have attempted to capture the broad spectrum of American domesticity, from the bucolic suburbia of "Father Knows Best," to the cramped urban quarters of "The Honeymooners," to Mayberry, the utopian small town at the heart of "The Andy Griffith Show."

Of the current crop of new and returning shows, few work as hard at creating a strong sense of place, and incorporating it into their thematic fabric, as "Desperate Housewives," now beginning its second season, and "Gilmore Girls," which has just started its sixth. Both are hour-long shows that take place in a recognizable if somewhat stylized version of reality. Both smartly blend comedy and drama. And both can claim to have large and loyal followings of women (and more than a few enlightened men).

On a deeper level, however, "Desperate Housewives" and "Gilmore Girls" are about the way people live in clustered, close-knit communities. In the former, it's Wisteria Lane, a street of well-kept suburban houses occupied by women struggling to balance their private and public selves. In the latter, it's the postcard-perfect town of Star's Hollow, Conn., where Norman Rockwell quaintness combines with just enough Felliniesque quirkiness to make it bearable for the hip mother and daughter who reside there.

These days, most hour-long dramas seem to take place in crime labs, police stations or hospitals. And the standard sitcom rendering of domestic space -- living room, sofa in the middle, stairs behind it, kitchen and entry off to the sides -- has become so cliched that viewers barely see it anymore; it exists solely to give the actors somewhere to sit or stand while they crack wise and mug for the camera.

Compare these bland, interchangeable spaces with the meticulously expressive interiors on "Desperate Housewives": the oh-so-tastefully decorated dining room belonging to the show's Martha Stewart manquée , Bree Van De Kamp; or the toy-strewn living room of Lynette Scavo (played by recent Emmy winner Felicity Huffman), whose four rambunctious children have drained her of whatever residual energy might be put toward tidying up. Or compare them with the Hartford estate of Lorelai Gilmore's parents -- the sort of house where one dresses for dinner, to be served at the antique dining table by a liveried servant.

No detail of either show is accidental. Every choice that "Desperate Housewives" production designer Thomas Walsh makes for a character's domestic environment sends a "coded message," he says. Images that show up on concept boards in his office -- poster-size visual summaries of characters' personalities reflected in magazine clippings, color samples, photographs of artworks and the like -- often materialize on the show's set, in one way or another.

To denote a condition that he and creator/executive producer Marc Cherry call "affluenza" -- whose symptoms include a lack of decorative restraint, and whose victims include Wisteria Lane's Gabrielle Solis and her husband, Carlos -- Walsh created rooms that suggest "the new rich trying to conform to the culture of the suburb they've embraced," he says. The couple's idea of tasteful art is a Warholian triptych of a come-hither Gabrielle on the stairwell; their notion of a serene master bath, an elevated tub in the center of the room, beneath a glittering chandelier, surrounded by candelabra.

The couple's passionate but volatile personalities had reminded Walsh of Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino; this season, he says, posters of the silver-screen icons will likely show up in the Solis's TV room. He adds that the newest desperate housewife to move onto the block, Betty Applewhite (played by Alfre Woodard), will arrive this season bearing a dark secret. To represent it physically, he has built for her a creepy and cobweb-festooned basement inspired by the one from "The Night of the Hunter," the 1955 film starring Robert Mitchum as menacing child predator.

On shows where interiors are asked to convey so much about the people who live there, details are everything. Rachel Kamerman, production designer for "Gilmore Girls," and her team scour the Warner Brothers prop department, local stores and flea markets, even e-Bay, to find the perfect item for a room. Sets for the Dragonfly Inn, the bed-and-breakfast managed by Lorelai, are practically indistinguishable from the real thing. To go from the sun-baked Warner Brothers lot into a dark soundstage where antique chairs, Victorian wallpaper and a grandma's attic worth of knickknacks have been arranged to evoke a cozy country inn is to experience the illusory magic for which Hollywood is famed.