TRIO was barely available outside of DirecTV and not even big enough to receive Nielsen ratings, but we generated enviable amounts of press due to our quirky mix of programming, and we tried our damnedest to convert it into ad dollars and distribution. I didn’t know it then, but I was in something of a boutique Bravo boot camp. When Universal—our parent company—merged with NBC, I heard rumblings that TRIO was headed for the dumpster. Those rumblings were confirmed when Lauren got the job running Bravo and TRIO became a victim of its own making: brilliant, but canceled.
Lauren told me she wanted me to come with her and run current programming at Bravo, a network I’d never really watched but was having a major moment with the success of a show I’d desperately wanted to buy for TRIO, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Bravo was seriously gay-friendly, with shows like Boy Meets Boy and Gay Weddings. I guess that didn’t make it gay enough for me, though, because I had my heart set on running programming for Viacom’s new gay start-up channel, Logo. I was amazed that times had changed so much that I would be considering two jobs involving gay TV. I got an interview at Logo, but no callback. I was disappointed at the time but, in retrospect, I haven’t been so glad of anything not happening since not taking that internship at KSDK in St. Louis. Had I gotten that job, my life would certainly have taken an entirely different direction. I don’t think I would ever have gotten my own show, and I probably wouldn’t be writing this book. So now you know who to thank. Or blame.
PERFECT PITCH
There’s no such thing as a perfect pitch. This is a law of the universe that holds true whether you’re a bewildered Little Leaguer on the baseball field or an at times even more bewildered broadcast executive in a network boardroom. At least at the network there’s no dirt and no tears, or at least not as many.
There’s a perception that TV shows are born in a brilliant flash, that an idea becomes a show in a nanosecond. But after twenty-two years in the business listening to thousands of pitches, I can say that the opposite is usually true. There are a lot of cooks in the TV kitchen and everybody wants to add a spice. Or a pile of weird ingredients they grabbed in a frantic quest to appear more cooklike. I have spent an upsetting amount of time (I could’ve been getting tan during that time!) in rooms with producers explaining show ideas to me and I can’t say there’s been one singular moment that felt like finding nirvana. Hearing the pitch for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was probably as close as I ever came, but I knew that the show would only go somewhere at a place with more money and more resources. Little did I know that Queer Eye would land at Bravo and I’d wind up supervising it when I took over their current programming.
At TRIO and later at Bravo, I’ve run not only all shows in production, but everything in development as well. “Development” is what happens to 99 percent of pitches that aren’t passed on outright. For example, Flipping Out was originally pitched as a show called The WannaBees about Jenni Pulos and her then husband Chris, two part-time actors who also worked for an obsessive-compulsive house flipper. When that OCD house flipper, Jeff Lewis, appeared on their demo reel, our development team said, “Who’s that guy!?” and Flipping Out was born.
Here’s what usually happens during a pitch: People come into your office or a conference room with a document or a DVD or a wannabe star and perform a sort of show-and-tell that’s either funny or desperate or brilliant or completely off the mark. Sometimes you know right off the bat that the show they’re pitching would never in a million years fit in at the network. In the biz we call that “off-brand.” (Though we don’t actually call it “the biz.”) Sometimes we get pitched things we are already doing, with a slight and often awful twist (e.g., Real Housewives of the Trailer Park, Real Housewives of Appalachia, Real Housewives of Compton, Real Housewives of the Bayou…). But even recognizing the great possibility that on any given day I may be about to listen to yet another Real Housewives of Somewhere presentation, I still live for that gut feeling of excitement I get when I hear something that is fresh, unique, and on-brand.
Ugh! I just yawned while I was typing, which is fitting because I have a terrible habit of yawning during pitches, which has got to be the worst possible trait for someone with my job. Once I took a pitch from Charlize Theron at 6 p.m. on a Friday at the end of a long week and congratulated myself on swallowing several teeny yawns, not realizing that they would get together inside me, combining into one huge yawn that I would be powerless to hold in. When I let one rip, Theron called me on it. Lucky for me, she was more amused than irritated. I’m sure it’d been years since someone had yawned in her beautiful face.
Sometimes pitches can be incredibly entertaining and provide a little window into who celebrities are as people—you could call them “Stars! They’re just like us!” moments. I’ve taken a pitch from Ashton and Demi, who seemed very in love and cuddly at the time. I had a meeting with Naomi Campbell, who couldn’t have been nicer and called in to my show later that night. Richard Simmons wore his tank top and short shorts in the winter and shocked a budget meeting as he pressed his face and body against the conference room windows on his way to my office. And what could be better than listening to Ivana Trump talk about her
