Ever wonder why there aren't more good shows on television? The process of wrestling a show to a network is not easy. The movers and shakers behind some of TV's kudos-catchers — shows like ABC's "Desperate Housewives," "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy" — will tell you that there's no formula and no assurance that a unique vision has a chance of catching on with the public.

Most of the shows are introduced during pilot season, the period in the fall when television creators are pitching their story ideas to the networks, then casting and actually making the pilot (a sample of the show.)

"You have 80 projects, and they're all scrambling around competing for the same limited pool of actors," says Carlton Cuse, one of the executive producers on "Lost." "You're trying to make pilots in a very short amount of time. Each of these phases is a place where failure is a high likelihood. And everybody's chasing the same actors, the same writers, and it's all on this clock to get everything done for announcements at Upfronts. And I don't think that that's necessarily the ideal way to sort of nurture something creatively."

The "Upfronts" are meetings at the end of May in New York to introduce the advertisers and press to promising new shows.

"You're asking for executives to also read your script with a fresh eye when they have most likely read, at that point, hundreds of things, which I can't imagine is fun for them," says Jenny Bicks, who served time on "Sex and the City" and is executive producer on "Men in Trees."

Marc Cherry, who created and orchestrates "Desperate Housewives," says he sold his show a different way. "I just wrote mine on my own. And by doing it on spec, I could take a year — OK, I'm kidding myself — a year and a half. And I just kept doing my own drafts and did my own kind of internal development with writer friends, getting opinions from them and kind of changing things, so that I actually handed my script in," he says.

"And Steve McPherson (president of ABC Entertainment) bought it in September, which is a time that everyone else is going in pitching ideas. So what was really cool for me was that the show was done, the vision was done. It wasn't just an idea. ... They could see the characters and everything. And we got picked up the first week of January of 2004. So I actually kind of bypassed the development process because I didn't let it go through the blender."

The "blender" often involves too much input by too many cooks, which tends to weaken the finished product, he says.

Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of "Lost," says, "What's sort of amazing about the television business is that you really are finding the show over the course of the first season.

"In our case, our vision was very cloudy. And because the show was so unique ... no one came forward and said, 'Here's what it should be.' And instead, we started finding it and saying, 'Oh, this is a cool idea. Let's try this' or 'The franchise of the show will be flashbacks, and we know that that's scary and potentially alienating because it hasn't been done before, but hey, they're on an island, so let's see if this works,' and being given the opportunity to do that."

Sometimes the censors — called Standards and Practices, in TV lingo — can get in the way. Lindelof says some things permitted on "Hill Street Blues" in 1991 are no longer possible.

"I spend like $100,000 a week taking nipples out of my show," adds Cherry, "because I've got a couple of actresses who refuse to wear bras, and the Standards and Practices go, 'Can't see that.' So what's interesting is then I'll turn on 'Friends,' and it's a nipple fest. I don't understand the difference. So that's an interesting thing you have to deal with."