The pot boiled over about an hour into the morning, when Danielle—totally off-topic—accused Teresa of not visiting her new nephew in the hospital, tipping off that she’d been in touch with Teresa’s sister-in-law. (Yes, Melissa Gorga, who would later go on to become a Jersey Housewife herself.) Teresa lost it, stood, and got in Danielle’s face. I didn’t know what to do. I had, like everyone else reading this, seen Teresa flip an innocent table on national television. Being a nice Jewish boy, I’ve never been in a physical fight in my life, and so if you rewatch a clip of it, you can see how completely awkward I am in trying to hold Teresa back, and indeed am eventually overpowered completely by the Italian Stallioness, who hurls me like a Raggedy Andy doll into my chair as Danielle walks off the set.
I spent the next fifteen minutes going back and forth from backstage to the stage, trying to calm both women down. Danielle was worried I wasn’t going to protect her as I weakly defended my not-quite-yeoman’s job, kind of sounding like my dad defending an action that my mom considered weak. “I got up … I helped … I’ll keep protecting you,” I muttered. She kind of, barely, bought it. (I did mean it, though; I would never in a million years allow anyone to put her hands on anyone else while I was there. And I now probably had the bruises to prove it.) When I got back to the set I pleaded with Teresa to just stay seated. “Just please do not get up off the couch. That’s the rule. Don’t get off the couch.” She nodded, but just as viewers sometimes wonder if Teresa processes what’s being said to her, in that moment I was not completely confident she wouldn’t get up again. At that point I didn’t contemplate that my ass had been kicked on-camera. I was way more concerned as a producer that the whole thing would dissolve into chaos and that we wouldn’t have a show at all.
When I returned from Atlantic City that day, I went straight over to my friends Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa’s house for a drink. They wanted to know what had happened at the show. “I don’t really remember—there’s too much noise in my head. I think I got pushed.” That push, when it aired, was replayed time and time and time again. An unintended consequence of learning that it was one of our highest-rated reunions to date was the ability to calculate just how many people all over the world had seen me get roughed up by a girl. When Teresa next appeared on Watch What Happens Live, I made her wear a seat belt during the show, as a joke. And because I was a little bit scared.
Danielle’s walk-off wasn’t unique. Walk-offs (or the threat of them) are common currency on reunion shows. They’re like a labor strike, with each side waiting for the other to blink. When Simon van Kempen joined us for the first RHNYC reunion, the other women threatened to walk off because they wanted their men to appear as well. The fact was that Simon had played a big role that season, so it seemed right to invite him. When Simon walked on, nobody walked off, and I thought we’d narrowly averted a huge crisis. Then, later on in the taping, Ramona became so upset that I’d brought up Alex’s nude photo controversy, which had erupted while the season was airing, that she walked off then, instead. At the time, I naïvely thought we’d have to get very creative in the edit to try to hide the fact that Ramona was no longer on the set, but after the show, I took one look at Christian and realized that it might have been the best thing that could have happened. It was all very theatrical. After that, we had a virtual parade of walk-offs in most of the franchises—not because of any encouragement from me, but because the Housewives look to each other for behavioral cues. At this point, though, angrily toddling off in your sky-high Louboutins seems very 2009, so I always beseech the women to just stay put.
At the end of the day, true emotion is the main ingredient behind a great reunion. Kandi is someone who “goes there”—she is an emotional woman who feels things deeply. Other women wipe fake tears in order to build sympathy. I won’t name names, of course, but review the contents of your DVR and judge for yourselves. But, truth be told, the line between real and fake (tears, not boobs) can get a little murky. In 2011, I was interviewing Slade Smiley on the Season 6 Real Housewives of Orange County reunion. Slade is a serial dater of OC Housewives, an incredible character whom we couldn’t make up if we tried—not even his name! Slade has appeared and reappeared on that show, most recently as Gretchen’s boyfriend. In this interview, Slade was saying that he loved Gretchen so much that he would let her go if he knew she was going to have a life surrounded by wealth, because that’s what she really deserved. He seemed like he really meant it, and Gretchen was silently weeping (or acting like she was weeping and doing an expert job of it). I was looking at Slade and I could see that his eyes were watering, a cue to me that he was in the zone where he could potentially really break down and cry, which is always interesting. So I started thinking—in a moment of half puppeteering and half producing—that it would be really something if Slade actually broke down. We’d never seen the man get emotional like that, and I thought it would lend a new dimension of depth to him and the show. Usually during an emotional interview I try to lock eyes with whomever I’m speaking to and let them know that
