On today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, Variety‘s Michael Schneider discusses Variety’s plans to take a long look at NBC’s centennial and its role in advancing mass media in the electronic age with the creation of the first radio network. And we have highlights from Kate Aurthur’s recent sit-down with Andy Cohen at the Newport Beach TV Fest. The two reflect on the “ongoing documentary project” that is “The Real Housewives” franchise.
In tackling a large project on NBC, Schneider observes that the value of taking a retrospective look back is to find the patterns and parallels to the modern era. The mid-1920s period when the National Broadcasting Company was born was a gold rush era driven by emerging technology (thank you, Marconi) and the opportunity to prosper by achieving scale — i.e. creating a network that would have much larger reach than any single radio station. That was the inspiration of David Sarnoff, the RCA Corp. leader who drove the launch of NBC, which laid the foundation for many more firsts.
“You talk about parallels to today. Every step of the way, technology changed things. The company had to evolve,” Schneider says. “I found a great film strip from 1948 that NBC put out, ‘The Dawn of Television,’ where they’re celebrating the fact that they’re 22 years old and the amount of progress they’ve already seen for the National Broadcasting Company. This is 1948 and they’re just introducing this new medium of television. And it feels very akin to what we’re seeing today as NBC evolves into streaming and other platforms beyond just broadcast. As much as things change, some things don’t.”
In her conversation with Cohen, who also hosts Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live” talk show, Aurthur pressed the multihyphenate on when he knew that “Real Housewives” was a true franchise that would endure. Cohen pointed to a key decision made by former Bravo chief Lauren Zalaznick. (The full video of Aurthur’s session with Cohen will be available on Variety.com later this week.)
“Lauren Zalaznick changed the name. It was going to just be called ‘The Real Housewives.’ And then she changed it to ‘The Real Housewives of Orange County’ in case we did it anywhere else. And I was like, ‘Well, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever. We’re not doing this show anywhere else. Here we are, 10 cities later,” Cohen says.
Another turning point came when the New York iteration of “Real Housewives” was crafted out of a different project.
“We turned development for a show called ‘Manhattan Moms’ into ‘The Real Housewives of New York.’ When I tell you that my mind was so blown. I was like, wait a minute, we can do this in New York. And these women are couldn’t be more different. It was like the New York women and the Orange County women were so different in the way they spoke and the way they lived, but they were women and they were dealing with issues that weren’t so far apart. And it just worked,” Cohen says.
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