Shooting the pilot took 13 days.
The original pilot featured Sheryl Lee as Mary Alice Young, Michael Reilly Burke as Rex Van De Camp and Kyle Searles as John. Lee was later replaced with Brenda Strong, Reilly with Steven Culp and Searles with Jesse Metcalfe, and their scenes were re-shot for the broadcast pilot.
The show's creators replaced Sheryl Lee because they felt her voice-over narration needed "more of a comic lift" and "somebody more present and less ethereal."
Wisteria Lane includes houses used numerous times throughout the years. Their names include the "Hardy Boys House", the "Leave it to Beaver House", the "Providence House", and the "Animal House". It has been incorrectly thought that these houses were the original neighborhood for "Leave it to Beaver". But this is impossible as the houses aren't anywhere near where they once stood in the 1950s. They have been moved and re-arranged and even destroyed and re-built numerous times since they were first bought by the city of Los Angeles which was going to destroy them to make way for Dodger Stadium.
Teri Hatcher, Brenda Strong and Marcia Cross all played Jerry Seinfeld's girlfriend-of-the-week on Seinfeld (1989). Two also played Charlie Sheen's girlfriend, Cross, on Spin City (1996) in Sheen's debut episode on that show, and Hatcher on Two and a Half Men (2003) in the first season.