Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture Andy Cohen (nice books to read .TXT) 📖

The first season—only seven episodes—did okay in the ratings for most of the run. Then suddenly, just before the finale, it started popping. Viewers who’d begun watching only to confirm that they found the women repellent somehow became invested in their stories—which proved to be more universal than anybody initially thought.

That first season we established guidelines and rules of thumb for making the show that we still follow today. Though we shoot a lot of footage for each season, we don’t shoot the show like The Real World, where cameras follow the stars around 24/7. For Season 2 of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, we shot 1,270 hours of footage to make twenty 44-minute episodes—or a ratio of approximately 85 hours of footage for every 1 hour used. Why do we shoot that much? Because we’re looking for those elements that make the perfect storm of a Real Housewives episode, namely, real humor, conflict, emotion, heart, and something totally unexpected—let’s say, a wig pull. Our producers find out what the women have coming up in a given week, and they pick and choose which situations to document. They keep tabs on how the ladies are feeling about each other and what happened the last time they were all together, so that no jarring or confusing gaps are left unexplained. When the ladies meet a friend or another housewife for lunch, the restaurant is called in advance and cleared for shooting. The housewives are not told what to say or how to think—all the footage is unscripted. The drama comes from the casting. We do not cast wallflowers—we want women with a point of view, plenty to say, and the confidence to say it in the presence of equally outspoken women. What started as a possible one-off experiment became an ensemble drama with story lines as complex as anything anyone could ever write.

At this point, we knew we were on to something. Plus, we had at trick up our sleeves that we didn’t even realize was there at first. Amy’s team had another show in development called Manhattan Moms, which featured two women that we absolutely loved, Jill Zarin and Alex McCord. They didn’t know each other, but they would soon enough. Jill was a fast-talking Upper East Side yenta type. (Her mother, Gloria, would castigate me years later for using the term “yenta,” but I always meant it with love.) Alex and her Australian husband, Simon (proud owner of the glossiest red leather pants mankind has ever seen), were from a completely different mold: outsiders striving to be insiders who were breeding their kids for overachievement. We thought we had the seed of a decent show on our hands, but with the success of The Real Housewives of Orange County, it occurred to us that it might be smart to turn Manhattan Moms into The Real Housewives of New York City. (If I didn’t thank her at the time, I would like to now publicly thank Lauren Zalaznik for her stroke of brilliance in adding a location to the original franchise title. It wasn’t clunky; it was genius.) The mere thought of a Real Housewives of New York City series gave me goose bumps, because I knew firsthand that women in New York were nothing like our Orange County ladies. Only the packaging and themes of the shows would be similar. And once we realized that our format could work somewhere else, producing a wildly different show depending on where it was set, we could not stop thinking of the possibilities. And indeed, every series has its own flavor: OC is cul-de-sac normality. Atlanta is campy and over the top. Jersey is hot-tempered and clannish. DC was thoughtful and provocative. Beverly Hills is image-conscious and this close to Hollywood. Miami is spicy and tele-novelic. New York is aggressive and controlling.

We set out to cast more women in New York and fell into the method we still use today—ask the women themselves to be our talent scouts. In this case, Jill Zarin became a great resource for us. In addition to Ramona, she brought us several other women in her circle, all of whom would have been perfect. But for one reason or another, women kept falling out—one cosmetics company executive couldn’t get her boss to agree to her appearing on the show, while another couldn’t convince her husband to go for it (both common obstacles that wind up quashing would-be wives). We passed our start date with two roles still to fill, so we started shooting with just Jill, Ramona, and Alex, knowing that footage would be unusable if we could not nail down the final cast. Finally, we told the producers and the women that we were canceling the show before it ever began if we didn’t get two more cast members. And then the reality TV gods smiled upon us, orchestrating a fantastical event that changed the face of the franchise.

It was a summer Saturday in the Hamptons—Super Saturday, to be exact, when a major shopping fund-raiser to fight breast cancer coincides with a big polo event. All you need to know about Super Saturday is that it’s a madhouse. On this particular Super Saturday afternoon, two desperate people—both desperate for something more—met at a place that is a magnet for desperate people … the polo tent in Bridgehampton.

Bethenny Frankel was in a fight with her boyfriend, and despite a splitting headache, she’d forced herself to go to that tent to network. She wanted to brand herself as a celebrity chef and she was searching for a photographer to take her picture, hoping that that picture might land somewhere and lead to something. She was looking for anything that might get her noticed and get her face out there. She was in a vile mood and, like I said, desperate.

“You skinny bitch! Look at you! Where’d you get the VIP bracelet?” There was no mistaking the nasal honk of Jill Zarin across the noisy