Andy Cohen: Why the Housewives Almost Didn't Happen
The franchise's executive producer reveals the show almost got canned.
Imagine a world in which we didn't have the Housewives!
It turns out there was a time when the first season of The Real Housewives of Orange County almost didn't happen. Andy Cohen opened up to EW about the show's near tragic fate back in 2006.
"I thought we almost killed that show—it was so plagued in season 1 with troubles in the edit room," Andy said. "We wound up getting rid of the original producers. We brought someone else in. It was a nightmare to produce. And we contemplated for a moment saying, "Well, should we just scrap this?'"
Several Housewives seasons and franchises later, Andy is pretty happy that wasn't the outcome: "I mean, thank god we didn't do it."
An offshoot of the brand is, of course, Andy's now infamous reunions at the end of every season, which he calls "part celebration and part grilling on the barbecue. So it's about finding the happy medium. I'm always thinking about the show as a fan and I'm thinking about it as a producer."
And, like Andy, the fans have a top-notch BS detector.
"Our viewers are so smart," he said. "They can tell when someone's faking it or they're pandering to the audience or they're trying to manipulate the story so that people view them in a different way. They can just tell and it always winds up coming back to them."
[Source: EW]
