Desperate Housewives may have been one of the biggest series on network television when it premiered in 2004, but according to one former writer, it was a “maddening” and “wildly inefficient” place to work.

Former TV writer Patty Lin described her experience working on the first season of the show under series creator and showrunner Marc Cherry in her new memoir, End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood, per Entertainment Weekly.

Lin wrote that she had already been considering leaving the industry in 2004 when she came across Cherry’s pilot script for Desperate Housewives and joined the writer’s room for the first season, where she was the only person of color on the staff of 10 writers.

Though she recalled there being a brief “honeymoon period” when she first started, she didn’t expect it to last. “Not with this many big personalities. The biggest was Marc’s,” she wrote. “I had never encountered overt racism until I worked for him.”

She detailed an incident that occurred when they were discussing comedian Margaret Cho‘s sitcom All-American Girl. “Marc turned to me and said, ‘Patty, you should write a show like that,'” Lin wrote. “I love Margaret Cho, but please don’t lump us together just because we’re both Asian women in show business.”

She claimed Cherry regularly missed deadlines and later turned the writer’s room into a “Lord of the Flies situation” where he heavily favored two writers and treated them as his “loyal team.”

His “wildly inefficient system” heavily impacted their ability to hand in good work, she wrote, but the show still took off after it premiered on ABC in 2004.

“The quality that had attracted me to the pilot — the dark humor — was lost in the slapdash, assembly-line approach to what was supposed to be a creative process. We were putting out schlock,” Lin wrote. “The fact that it became the hottest show on TV, won multiple awards, ran for eight years, and earned more revenue than God still boggles my mind.”

Indeed, the series went on for eight years and scored multiple Golden Globes and Primetime Emmy Awards. The dramedy stars Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, Eva Longoria and Marcia Cross as a group of neighbors who live on the fictional but idyllic Wisteria Lane – that is, until the death of a neighbor and fellow housewife throws a wrench in their picturesque lives.

Lin was eventually let go from the show after the network picked the series up for another nine episodes that season.

All eight seasons of Desperate Housewives are now streaming on Hulu and Freevee.