Physical Creator Annie Weisman Spills Everything About The Series

How did you come up with the concept for "Physical," and what was the inspiration behind the show?

The inspiration for the show came from really wanting to explore my own childhood, growing up in the '70s and '80s in San Diego, California, and watching this big shift in the culture happen, specifically in my family. My parents went from being these Berkeley radicals to becoming Reagan voters, and the culture around us was shifting in the same way. So it was kind of the waning of one period and the rise of another.

I wanted to explore it all through the character of this woman who is standing in the shadow of a charismatic husband. We watch her find a really unexpected, independent source of empowerment away from him and in her own space, which is in this new fitness world that's becoming an increasingly popular trend around her. And, yeah, that was the beginning of it.

And then, just personally, I wanted to find a way to explore my own struggle with a really difficult eating disorder that I kept private for most of my adult life and was tired of struggling with alone. I was ready to tell the truth about who I was on the inside and not just what I projected on the outside. So those threads all came together in writing the script.

Did your time on "Desperate Housewives" influence the show at all?

Working on that show really did inspire me in a lot of ways. You got a real sense of being part of that show. Audiences really loved and embraced those characters for the dark shades of what they did, for the honesty with which they were portrayed, and that was really groundbreaking at the time. It does give you permission and inspire you to not pull punches when it comes to female characters. It's what bonds the audiences to them, when they see not just the aspirational attributes in themselves, but the darker ones as well.

What similarities do you see between the two shows?

Well, like I said, I think they both feature women that out of ... I guess you could say desperate circumstances, do things to challenge social norms and expectations. Also, a lot of the joy of that show ["Desperate Housewives"] was the way it portrayed the complexities of female friendship, the ups and downs of female connection. And that's something that was a surprise to me; a really important part of the show is building towards female friendship. I was a young writer early in my career, getting to work on a big broadcast show with a lot of amazing people and just learned a lot about the process of making television from working on it with so many great people. So by the time it came time for me to create my own show, I had a lot of tools and role models behind me that I could draw from.