Except that the rough cuts sucked. The confessional interviews where the ladies spoke straight to camera weren’t stylized—they weren’t well lit, and the women didn’t look their best. Something else was missing, too. The women weren’t going deeply into their emotions or being honest about what was happening with their friends. And the stories didn’t always make sense—what they were saying didn’t match the way we saw them acting. Why was Jo bored while Slade was at work? Did Vicki have a love/hate relationship with Jeana, or did she really just hate her? And where was Jeana’s husband all the time?
The more we at Bravo asked the producers out in California for answers to fill in the blanks, the less anyone knew. We discussed killing the Housewives before they ever hit the air. In fact, we went so far as to put together a budget to how much of a bath Bravo would take if we just cut our losses and walked away. But—thank the lord—we decided to stay with it and start over again. We parted ways with the original producers and sank even more resources into the Housewives by shooting additional interviews with the women and even more footage of their daily lives. Then we headed back to the editing room.
Even with this richer material, we had other problems. For instance, the cast looked like a California Implant Pageant where you couldn’t tell the contestants apart. I wasn’t the only one at Bravo with this issue, and if we couldn’t keep them straight after watching hours of footage of them, we certainly couldn’t expect viewers to be able to. That’s when we devised the animated banners and little chapter headings that appear before each person’s scene.
Lauren Zalaznick and Bravo marketing head Jason Klarman came up with the idea of playing off the opening of Desperate Housewives, where Teri Hatcher and the gang held apples, by having our ladies hold oranges. Just before the premiere, Lauren tacked “of Orange County” onto the title, in case we ever decided to do another version of the show somewhere else. Bravo exec Shari Levine and I initially objected, worried that the “of Orange County” was so CLUNKY. Plus, given the troubles we’d had in the edit of this show, we just knew the chances that we’d ever replicate it anywhere else were zero. (Yes, I am occasionally a massively misguided idiot.)
I held my breath the first time I saw the show intro for the OC Housewives. Each of the women appeared in various pieces of “fashion”—that season it was bust-enhancing satiny tops with a big, bejeweled centerpiece (called “skytops”!)—while saying something that was supposed to define who they were. The statements were along the lines of “I love Botox!” and “Everybody has enormous boobs!” and “Here’s to not being fake!” (If you’re keeping a running tab of how many times I’m mentioning the word “boob,” welcome to my world with the Housewives. I’ve talked more about boobs in the last few years than most editors at Playboy and way more than any gay man ever should.) Watching that first episode as it aired, I worried that the women were going to think we’d painted them in the most shallow light possible. I was sure they were going to hate it, freak out, and quit. I asked Shari to find out how the women had reacted. She left to make some calls, and after just a few minutes, she returned to my office.
“They absolutely love it.” She smiled. And just like that, I knew that the most important element of the show, the only element, was stable. These women were going to go along for the ride. And the ride? It was going to be wild …
The reviews were mixed. Tom Shales of the Washington Post called the women “fascinating bores,” but predicted “sociologists and anthropologists of the future are going to have tons and tons of material to sift through as they try to understand what life was like in the first decade of the 21st century.” David Bianculli of the New York Daily News hated it: “Not only did I not care about this quintet of California preeners, but I was rooting against them.” Charles McGrath in the New York Times opined, “Like so much reality TV, it’s both educational and grimly fascinating, and leaves you feeling much better about your own life—if for no other reason than that you would never be so stupid as to appear on a show like this.” I did say they were mixed, right? I mean, if you stare at that Shales quote long enough, it is practically a rave of the magnitude normally reserved for British mysteries on PBS!
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting this type of show to win acclaim from the pros; I was much more worried about the critics closer to home. When Graciela called after the first episode, I had been silently questioning whether I was on to something or crazy. Then she gushed: “Vicki Gunvalson? Are you kidding me? Did you make her up? Obsessed. Lauri? She might be my favorite. She’s the Farrah. Is Jeana’s son hot? Doesn’t she look like Wynonna Judd?”
Back in St. Louis, The Real Housewives of Orange County wasn’t playing to any standing ovations in the Cohen household. My mom was having none of their self-absorbed nonsense.
“I can’t watch those women,” Evelyn declared. She refused to budge no matter how many times I implored her to give it another try. She only tuned back in the following year for the reunion show and that was because I hosted it. And her comments still weren’t exactly positive.
“Well, you looked okay,” she allowed. But “THOSE WOMEN!??” Evelyn
