The Housewives: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewives

by Brian Moylan

When I started recapping, I thought people just wanted to have their opinions confirmed. I imagined my readers wanted an “expert” to tell them that, yes, this season Jill Zarin was behaving like a crazy person, or maybe we shouldn’t make too much fun of Gia Giudice’s songwriting ability because she’s only a minor. (Though her birthday song for her sister is an all-time classic.)

I like to call the Housewives, even those I don’t particularly care for, my “TV friends.” I’ll never meet most of them in real life, but I talk about their latest tantrums, dating habits, business failures, and outfit choices at brunch as if each is a part of my extended circle.

“But I really love the Housewives.” He didn’t have me at hello, but he did have me at “Sonja Morgan is my favorite.”

I decided to write this book mostly for selfish reasons, to answer all the questions that keep me awake at night. How does casting work? How does the show get made? Does Andy Cohen really have as much power as we think he does? Who on earth actually pays for these trips? I wanted to call up insiders for some other reason than being a nosy reality fan.

I spent over two years trying to figure all of this out so no one will have to lose sleep over the Housewives again.

I talked to Real Housewives, some on the record and some off. I tracked down former Bravo executives and current employees. And I spoke to dozens of the real soldiers on the ground—the producers, editors, sound technicians, and production assistants that really get things done. I found these people, often more than the Housewives themselves, truly insightful about how the show gets made and why we love it. Almost everyone who worked on the show, past or present, requested that their names not be used for fear of retribution from Bravo, which can ruin a career faster than Ramona Singer can order a pinot grigio.

There is nothing that annoys a Real Housewife, former or otherwise, more than a woman who says to her, “They asked me to be on The Real Housewives, and I told them no.”

“When that person at the dinner party is like, ‘They considered me.’ I’m always like, ‘All right,’” says Kristen Taekman, who was on seasons 6 and 7 of The Real Housewives of New York City. “It’s one thing to get the contracts, and then it’s another thing to be considered, because there’s a ton of people that are considered.”

Bravo now wants all new Housewives to have a job, but if they don’t, production isn’t above creating one for them. (Just ask a certain “accountability coach.”)

As for personality, it’s a bit less cookie-cutter, but there is one essential: a woman must be willing to put her entire life on camera for four to six months of filming. She must be unafraid to talk about the cracks in her marriage, the disappointment of not being able to conceive, the heartbreak of being snubbed by someone she thought was her friend, or the devastation of her divorce. She needs to be willing to, in the words of Bethenny Frankel talking about her past as an actress in erotic Skinemax-style movies, “mention it all!”

What will life be without Bethenny? (Oh, I’m sure we’ll be fine. After all, we have the in-jail-out-of-jail-deportation-dating-again life of Teresa Giudice to keep us occupied.)

If movies are a director’s medium and scripted TV is a writer’s medium, then reality TV is a casting director’s medium.

Housewives casting directors, usually freelancers who work on multiple reality shows, start their search with the women they’ve already booked. “We found the number-one thing for every season I cast, and still do for that type of format, is you want to find someone that’s organically in the group,” says a director who worked on many early seasons of the show.

Barrie Bernstein, who has been working on RHONY since its start, agrees. “What makes the best cast member is someone who knows the current cast,” she told an audience at BravoCon, Bravo’s first fan convention in 2019.

kind of go through the motions and interview them and pretend you’re going to put them on the show knowing they’re probably not the best choice.”

Cary Deuber says that she brought her friends Kameron Westcott and Kary Brittingham to the attention of those casting The Real Housewives of Dallas. She insists it wasn’t awkward when she was demoted to “friend of” the cast while Kary was asked to sign a contract for the show’s fourth season.

(if a Real Housewife has a party without a step and repeat, did it make a sound?),

Those women who don’t come through the Housewives directly are found through research. “We start looking at who they know, because we want these connections to seem organic even though we all know a lot of them aren’t,” a casting director says. “If you can tie them together—maybe they’re part of the same charity group or maybe they live on the same street or their husbands work together—it helps.”

“It’s just doing outreach. It’s asking: Where are they getting their nails done? Where are they buying their cars? Where are they buying their jewelry? I’m contacting those people, getting referrals that way.”

In the early days, there were even some open casting calls in Orange County and New York. A typical scene took place in 2009 at the marble-dappled South Coast Plaza mall in Orange County, where about seventy women turned up t...

Often, the women who want the show the most are the most unsuitable.

The audience can sense inauthenticity like a vegan can sense a break in the conversation to talk about their dietary habits.

“I got bombarded with business,” Barshop says. She had never seen Housewives, but called her publicist right away to ask what was the biggest reality show at the time. When the publicist said RHONY, Barshop told her, “Get me an interview.”

The first stage for a promising candidate these days is a phone screen. A casting director will ask about her family, her jobs, where she lives, if she watches the show, and generally probes whether she’s suitable and interesting enough to make it to the next round. They try to push and prod her into saying things that might be unflattering, like they would in one of the “confessional” interviews the Housewives film each season. One former Housewife told me it was the closest she ever felt to being in an actual interrogation.

With the exception of RHONY, the typical Housewife home is going to be a suburban McMansion, but details do vary. The RHOC house can have a bit of a beachy feel, whereas the RHONJ house is a faux château as assembled by Home Depot. The RHOA women live in the kind of houses that have brick fronts but white siding around the rest of the house. There are almost always columns. On The Real Housewives of Potomac, the houses are much the same except the lawns are drier. It’s only RHOBH where the homes are sleek and architectural or understatedly homey, the kind of thing you’d see in Architectural Digest. It must be said that most of these are in the San Fernando Valley, rather than Beverly Hills proper.

Of the twenty to fifty women who start the process each year, about a dozen make it this far. The casting directors and producers then do a background check on the women—what their husbands do, what their net worth is, whether or not they have a criminal record. We all know that last one wouldn’t get a potential Housewife stricken from the list, necessarily, but it is good to know.

“Like a lot of women get to the last stage and then just completely shit the bed.”

NeNe Leakes, then working as a real estate agent, says that she had a meeting planned with producers from Bravo at her house to talk about casting her on the show, and she was so nervous that she decided she was going to have only wine for breakfast. “I was drinking, and when she rang the doorbell and I opened it, I said, ‘Helloooo and welcome, honey,’” she revealed in an interview with E!

“I am NeNe Leakes, and I’m forty years old,” she says. “I’m bougie. I’m ghetto. I’m hood. I’ll cuss you out. You know, whatever I gotta do, and I know how to go out and handle my business, and flip properties, and open up a hotel. I can do all that. But, at the same time, I’m not gonna take your [bleep].”

Chris Oliver-Taylor, who developed The Real Housewives of Melbourne, invited that show’s candidates to lunch in different configurations and gave them conversation-starting note cards to preview who would emerge as what type.

Producers may be looking for the next breakout reality star, but the cast of each city also has to be balanced out among different roles: the alpha, the drunk, the voice of reason, the comic relief, and, most importantly, the villain. If you have all alphas, things are too contentious; all voices of reason, things are too boring; all drunks, they’re The Real Housewives of New York City.

Her creative vision led to the two key things the network still looks for in any new show: the “Bravo wink” and the “Bravo sheen.”

The Bravo wink is something all viewers understand even if they don’t have a name for it. It is the acknowledgment to the viewers that, yes, the creators know that this is just as ridiculous as we think it is. The wink shows up when a Real Housewife says one thing and then the camera shows her doing the exact opposite. You know, like when Kyle Richards says, “I never said that,” and the editors roll a clip of her saying that exact thing as “17 minutes earlier” appears at the bottom of the screen.

The Bravo sheen is the thing that makes every show look expensive. You’re not just watching the loony people at a gym, you’re watching the loony people at a gym you can’t afford and it looks like it was filmed by a bunch of former USC film majors with top-of-the-line equipment. A Bravo show is never the Zara ...

Just ask Vicki Gunvalson, who was put out after fourteen years on Real Housewives of Orange County, in part, I was told, because the amount of plastic surgery she had made her hard to look at for some execs.

When Bravo started in 1980, it was basically porn.

But Bravo did share channel space with a porn network when it was founded as a pay station showing highbrow arts entertainment. It was started by Charles “Chuck” Dolan, the cable television visionary (televisionary?) who became a billionaire after starting cable provider Cablevision and wiring a lot of New York City’s buildings for cable TV.

Bravo’s remit was different from SportsChannel and considerably more highbrow. For between five to ten dollars a month, Gothamites could watch opera, ballet, jazz, and other performances happening at Lincoln Center or the Metropolitan Opera from the comfort of their own Upper East Side enclaves.

Where’s the porn? you ask. Well, back in the ’80s, some cable networks shared channel space. Channel 80 might be one thing during the week and something else on the weekend. That was the arrangement with Bravo, which aired programming only on Sunday and Monday nights from 8:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m., which seems like a pretty odd time to be sitting at home waiting for the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s version of Don Giovanni.

Three other days of the week, viewers had access to Escapade, a soft-core porn channel. Watching The Magic Flute on Escapade probably took on an entirely different meaning than it did watching it on Bravo.

Bravo would be the only one to survive, though it was not initially a roaring success. In 1981, it had 48,000 subscribers, which is probably how many people log on to Netflix every second of the day. By 1985, its ranks had swelled to a whopping 350,000.

Five years later, Bravo was in five million homes, sometimes as part of a basic cable package and sometimes still as a subscription service. It was still mostly arts and movies with subtitles (or at least subtext). It was also gay-friendly way before it was cool.

An amazing show called The It Factor followed young actors trying to achieve their big break; the New York–set first season was still realistic, but with some extreme personalities. Hey, actors gonna act! The second season, set in LA, featured a pre-fame Jeremy Renner among the cast.

And yet, as of 2002, the average age of the Bravo viewer was fifty—ancient in terms of advertising dollars.

Who cares? None of us will ever see $1.25 billion in our lifetimes.

The marketing worked, making the July 15, 2003, two-part premiere Bravo’s two most-watched programs of all time, at 1.64 and 1.37 million viewers, respectively. Thanks to NBC replaying shortened episodes on the network and great word of mouth, viewership peaked that fall at 3.34 million viewers.

Yes, the beating heart of Bravo has always been linked to queer culture and its queer fans.

The first episode of Real Housewives of Orange County is not at all like the show that viewers would eventually come to cherish, full of table flipping, wine throwing, and women navigating their ways through the shark-filled waters of fame together. The women don’t interact much at all.

Critics were not kind to the show. It “isn’t entertaining, exactly—it has none of the wit or style of Desperate Housewives. But 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,” Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times.

Paul Brownfield in the Los Angeles Times had a similar take: “The show is built either to nauseate or fascinate; I myself danced between periods of both, which is probably just what the producers, layering on the scripted scenarios, intend.” Wait. He wasn’t supposed to know those scenarios were scripted, and they purported not to be.