The tension, as the women were getting settled into their chairs, was as thick as an expensive weave. I hadn’t experienced anything like this level of hostility before. Normally, my job during these marathon tapings is to keep everybody’s energy up and get them motivated to reveal everything. With the first Atlanta reunion, I quickly realized my job might be to block a punch. Within ten minutes of shooting, while I was probing Kim about her secret-identity sugar daddy, Big Poppa, NeNe went ballistic and looked like she was about to swing at Kim. As NeNe kept yelling at Kim to “close your legs to married men, trashbox,” I wavered between amusement and actual fear.
I think this is honestly the appropriate response to a Housewives reunion. It’s like getting the giggles at a funeral: You know it’s not the time to laugh, but you can’t stop. I get that sensation a lot during reunions—I think viewers do, too—and the editors often have to cut away from my smiling face. How can something so occasionally mortifying also be so hilarious? It’s the women’s personalities, their turns of phrase, the pressure-cooker setting, the sharpness of their accusations versus the tenderness of their feelings, that contribute to making it seem like theater of the sublime, at once dramatic and comedic. Oh, and they’re all in cocktail attire with big hair.
Am I smiling because I’m scared, amused, or both?
When that first Atlanta taping was over, I was honestly worried about the outburst—I didn’t want the show to be too negative. We cut back on much of NeNe’s tirade but left enough in that you got a taste of the moment. The ratings were huge.
First reunions are always intense—there’s all that expectation and anxiety around a major event the women haven’t experienced before. I’ve already mentioned my preview of the New Jersey Housewives reunions when I met the ladies for the first time in the Bravo offices. Dina looked at me that day with terror in her eyes. All she knew about me was that I was an instigator, and she didn’t want to be instigated. I told her not to worry, that we were just having a professional meeting—the reunion was months away. But as the meeting progressed, the tension among the women erupted into screaming matches. I kept telling the women, “This isn’t the reunion—save it for then!” To which Dina replied, “Are you really ready for this, Andy Cohen?” I thought I was.
We usually tape the reunions a few weeks before the finale airs, and we solicit as many questions from viewers as we can leading up to the event. We knew at the time that the RHNJ table flip—arguably one of the greatest Housewives episodes ever—would be big, but we didn’t know it would be one of the highest-rated episodes still in the history of the franchise and generate countless parodies from every corner of pop culture. We went into the taping with high expectations that the tension among the women would translate into something extraordinary. And here’s a lesson: I’ve found that the reunions I anticipate the most wind up somehow falling flat.
The whole setup for the New Jersey Season 1 reunion felt like a comedy waiting to happen. We had two very pregnant participants—Jacqueline and Teresa. Because Jacqueline’s due date was a few days away, we had to shoot close to her hospital and wound up in a small commercial studio somewhere in the middle of Jersey; to be more precise, amid abandoned railroad tracks and empty warehouses. If anybody had wanted to get rid of my body, there would have been no lack of places to stash it, as long as someone else wasn’t already buried there. When I walked in that morning, I took one look at the set and turned to Bravo exec Christian Barcellos, my on-site producer and partner-in-crime at almost every reunion, and declared it the ugliest we’d ever used.
How to describe this set … a chessboard-style black-and-white-tiled floor; the tackiest white sofa and loveseat flanking what was to be my chair, a wide white baroque throne with wings; a big white filigreed coffee table topped with a massive, funereal flower arrangement in the shape of New Jersey; and a background resembling an endless Teletubbiesesque blue sky with several large chandeliers hanging from nowhere. Christian, usually a pro at making last-minute lighting tweaks that magically transform the feel of a set, said, “Well, it does feel like a cross between The Avengers and Heaven Can Wait, but we’re working on making the blue darker.” When we sent a preview picture to Shari Levine at Bravo HQ, she e-mailed back: “I can’t stop laughing. That is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.” The New Jersey Housewives always ride that line between over-the-top and leopard chic—it’s part of the fun of the show—but this set was like New Jersey on a bad acid trip.
Despite the god-awful set, we thought it would be a great show: Tension had been high among the ladies for over a year and the confrontations were bound to be epic. When I walk into a reunion taping, the first person I look for is Christian, who’s always ready to brief me on the moods of the various ladies. And on that day it
