‘Desperate Housewives’ Is 20: ‘Matlock,’ ‘The Munsters’ & More Shows Filmed on Wisteria Lane

Two decades ago, TV viewers tuned into Desperate Housewives for the first time and met the residents of Wisteria Lane, a suburban street where lawns couldn’t be tidier and lives couldn’t be messier.

But the fictional Wisteria Lane is the real-life Colonial Street, one of the outdoor sets on Universal Studios’ backlot in Los Angeles. And many of the houses had been in use in films and the TV shows for decades by the time of Desperate Housewives’ debut on ABC on October 3, 2004.

“It wasn’t, ‘Hey, let’s build a big neighborhood set and construct all of these houses at the same time,’” Jeff Pirtle, former director of archives and collections for NBCUniversal, told Los Angeles Magazine in 2019. “It was a product of smart studio use of recycling sets and then realizing that you have all of these great facades around the studio and bringing them all together to make a neighborhood.”

With information from Los Angeles Magazine and TheStudioTour.com, here are details on the Hollywood productions that also filmed on the street we now call Wisteria Lane.