In 2008, Watch What Happens Live moved to Rock Center and broadcast as the online companion to Bravo’s final season of Project Runway. By then we’d added cocktails to the mix and even booked some non-Bravo celebrity guests to join us. In early 2009, Michael Davies came to Bravo and pitched the idea of bringing the show to the network in late night and moving its home to a small studio he owned in SoHo. Frances and Lauren asked if I’d like to give it a try for twelve weeks at midnight. This time I just said, “Eff yes!” without all the humble bullshit. I met with Davies—again at the Palm—and told him I wanted to keep the format spontaneous, interactive, and simple; the only actual structural beats to hit would be a poll, three “Here’s What” items to discuss at the top, a game, and a Mazel and a Jackhole of the Week.
We used my own furniture (a rug, a few chairs, and a bunch of tchotchkes) to decorate the set (aka “the Clubhouse”), which is modeled after my den in my apartment.
So, my show actually happened gradually and organically—from e-mails, to a blog, to online, to reunion shows, to live at midnight, and then 11 p.m. And had the show failed in that midnight slot? I promise you it would’ve been canceled. Because if there’s one thing I know from my day job as a network executive, sometimes no matter how much you personally love a show, if it is wounded and bleeding, you have to put it down.
Hosting a live, televised interactive cocktail party from my “den” is as fun as it looks—maybe even more. We play games involving cocktails, blindfolds, and wigs. We make up words (e.g., para ejemplar, “Ramotional”). We acquired a pet turtle, named Tramona, who was really into costumed roleplay. One night, we had a blackout on-air right after I gave Patti LaBelle crabs—the crustacean, eating variety, not the pubic type. Another night, the producers secretly changed my copy in the teleprompter and before I realized what was happening, I was obliviously introducing a surprise our booker had orchestrated for me, an appearance by one of my all-time faves, Marie Osmond. (Yes, I welled up—a bucket list moment.) We have a small team, much smaller than any other TV show I’m familiar with, and while we work hard on this informal-seeming little show of ours, we try never to let it look hard, and I think that’s part of what people like about it. It’s also a bit of a throwback to the days when a late-night talk show meant a host and a guest in cool-looking chairs, tossing back a few drinks over a conversation that is neither premeditated nor preproduced. Anything can happen, and I love it best when anything does.
Holly Hunter looks on as Ralph Fiennes and I role-play Harry Potter in our PJs. In other words, another insane night in the Bravo Clubhouse!
Q: Is there a Bravo show that is actually more successful than you expected it to be?
A: Yes. Believe it or not, I thought that Top Chef was destined for the disposal before it was even made. With fashion thriving on Bravo in the form of Project Runway and Queer Eye, Lauren Zalaznick was adamant that we come up with a show that did for food what we’d done for fashion on Runway. When I say adamant, I mean that she declared it the singular mandate of my department. I’m not what you’d consider a foodie, having once thrown up after being forced to eat a pea, and I had a stomach full of peas when I contemplated what might happen if our as-yet-unborn cooking show didn’t work.
Top Chef came to be as a collaboration with Dan Cutforth, Jane Lipsitz, and their team at the Magical Elves, already our partners on Project Runway. Throughout the show’s development and production, we debated our central dilemma: how to make an engaging cooking competition when no one at home could taste the food. It was so easy—and interactive—to critique a dress on Runway, but is it fun to hear somebody talk about a scallop being too salty? We formatted the show around two challenges—one fun, fast, and skill-based, and the other unexpected, over the top, and often engineered to highlight inter-chef drama.
Days before we were to begin production on Season 1 of Top Chef, I found myself in a position that no TV executive ever wants to be in, and one I’m embarrassed to admit I have lived through several times for one reason or another: We didn’t have a host. (For a head judge, Bravo exec Dave Serwatka was pumped about someone who was a newbie to TV: Tom Colicchio, whom Dave called “a chef’s chef.” Tom was wise and direct and pulled no punches.) Not having a host—or a guest—for a show that is days away from production is a very specific kind of hell. It is a hell involving a merry-go-round of just-out-of-reach names and looming failure spinning around your brain while beads of sweat trickle from every nook of your body.
We had our eye on Padma Lakshmi, an Indian American model/actress/writer/presenter and then wife of Salman Rushdie. You couldn’t find a more intriguing combination than that. We began speaking to her, and if you know Padma, you know
