Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture

it as a dialogue with Bravo viewers about everything from interviews with the Project Runway judges about why they’d eliminated Santino the night before, to, eventually—after readers got to know me a bit—what I had done the night before. In the early days, when I was still learning, sometimes I’d lose touch with my journalistic roots and I would be a little too creative in my reporting online. When Heidi Klum made a controversial remark on Runway about a design making a model look “plus-size,” I hastily blogged that no, no, no, Heidi didn’t mean it. Except the problem was, I didn’t know what Heidi meant, and moreover, she did not appreciate me speaking for her. I also blogged about rumors that two designers were hooking up. This, I was later told, did not go over so well with the live-in lover one of the designers had back home. “You caused a lot of trouble,” Santino told me. I felt pretty awful.

(Of course my mother was constantly up my ass about the blog. “No one liked Wednesday’s blog. You got ONE comment! People don’t like when you write about things they don’t care about. You write about Oprah too much. Are you AWARE of that? Are you MONITORING the comments?” No, I wasn’t monitoring the comments. Clearly, my mother had it covered.)

Being a blogging network exec somehow made me “credible” enough to get invitations to be a pop-culture-commenting windbag on various CNN shows, Weekend Today, and once even The View. This wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined getting on TV all those years earlier, but I relished the opportunity. My best buddy, Bruce Bozzi, is a restaurant guru—he helps run the Palm Restaurant empire, which his grandfather founded—and he became my de facto media coach, watching every single appearance I made with a critical eye.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” he’d say. “That was good. But you sat with your legs wide open. You need to cross the legs!” That was a big one, but it was nothing compared to what I did with my head. “Again with the head-cock! You did that whole section about the Academy Awards with your head tipped like your brains were about to run out! But the outfit was great.” Of course he would think that: Bruce always told me what to wear when I went on TV.

During Season 2 of Top Chef, Lauren decided to create a live webshow to “air” on BravoTV.com after each episode, with me as moderator. She viewed it as an extension of my blog, and I viewed it as a fun lark and an opportunity to learn something about hosting. Every Wednesday night, I would schlep to CNBC headquarters in beautiful Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to interview the chef who had just been eliminated at Judges’ Table, along with one of the judges who had just done the eliminating plus a famous chef or a Top Chef Season 1 alum. The show was named after our Bravo tagline: Watch What Happens Live. We didn’t have much of a set, studio, staff, or audience, and I loved every low-rent second of it.

The year 2007 was a big one for Bravo. Everything just jelled. With Project Runway and Top Chef, we had two new hits, and suddenly we weren’t just the Queer Eye network anymore. Kathy Griffin won an Emmy, Work Out had an intense second season, and Sheer Genius and Flipping Out premiered. Everywhere I went, people wanted to talk about our shows. Many people like to leave their work at the office, but I like to drag my work around with me everywhere, and I couldn’t have been more pleased. When the season of Top Chef ended, I continued schlepping out to Englewood Cliffs to do Watch What Happens Live on the Web as an aftershow to Top Design.

Meanwhile, back at the Bravo offices, when the second season of The Real Housewives of Orange County took off, we decided to add a reunion, but we needed a host. In a production meeting one day, programming chief Frances Berwick and Lauren asked if I’d want to try a TV version of the webshow for the OC reunion. They were asking me if I wanted to host a show on TV! I did that thing where I pretended that I couldn’t possibly do such a thing for about two seconds before I did that thing where I pretended like they had finally talked me into it. My answer was “Eff yes!”

If you watch that reunion show today, you will see me stiffly reading from a teleprompter with a velvet jacket, a Jewfro, and teeth so white they look like a little sheets of paper. (I’m guessing I’d either overwhitened my teeth or overtanned the day before.) You’ll also see me having loads of fun with the viewer questions (“Lauri, how do you feel about being compared to a transvestite?”). Despite the bumpy parts, I didn’t completely bomb, and the ratings were good. Good enough that my bosses decided I would get several more shots that year, hosting the dramatic Season 2 reunion of Work Out (one of the trainers, Doug Blasdell, had suddenly passed away during production, so there were many tears), plus reunions of Sheer Genius (I got to ask former Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith questions on television!), Top Chef: Miami, and Flipping Out.

Pretty soon, I was hosting all the reunion shows, and producer Michael (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire) Davies called me up and invited me to lunch. I picked the Palm, of course, and over steaks he told me in his so-charming-as-to-be-nearly-intoxicating British accent, “Wot you should be dewwwwwing is hosting a television show, full-time, Guvnah!” (I may be exaggerating his accent a wee bit.) Whether Michael was blowing smoke up my ass or not, for the first time in my career I believed that I actually could do what I’d dreamed of as a CBS intern. I believed I could make the transition from behind the scenes to