Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (24 page)

Meanwhile, back at the Bravo offices, when the second season of
The Real Housewives of Orange County
took off, we decided to add a reunion, but we needed a host. In a production meeting one day, programming chief Frances Berwick and Lauren asked if I’d want to try a TV version of the webshow for the OC reunion. They were asking me if I wanted to host a show on TV! I did that thing where I pretended that I couldn’t possibly do such a thing for about two seconds before I did that thing where I pretended like they had finally talked me into it. My answer was “Eff yes!”

If you watch that reunion show today, you will see me stiffly reading from a teleprompter with a velvet jacket, a Jewfro, and teeth so white they look like a little sheets of paper. (I’m guessing I’d either overwhitened my teeth or overtanned the day before.) You’ll also see me having loads of fun with the viewer questions (“Lauri, how do you feel about being compared to a transvestite?”). Despite the bumpy parts, I didn’t completely bomb, and the ratings were good. Good enough that my bosses decided I would get several more shots that year, hosting the dramatic Season 2 reunion of
Work Out
(one of the trainers, Doug Blasdell, had suddenly passed away during production, so there were many tears), plus reunions of
Sheer Genius
(I got to ask former Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith questions on television!),
Top Chef: Miami
, and
Flipping Out
.

Pretty soon, I was hosting all the reunion shows, and producer Michael (
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
) Davies called me up and invited me to lunch. I picked the Palm, of course, and over steaks he told me in his so-charming-as-to-be-nearly-intoxicating British accent, “Wot you should be dewwwwwing is hosting a television show, full-time, Guvnah!” (I may be exaggerating his accent a wee bit.) Whether Michael was blowing smoke up my ass or not, for the first time in my career I believed that I actually
could
do what I’d dreamed of as a CBS intern. I believed I could make the transition from behind the scenes to on-air. I was still making appearances as a pop culture pundit on any show that would have me, and I was still getting notes from Bruce critiquing my appearances. He said I’d gotten my head-cocking at least partly under control, but I needed to watch my interrupting (“It’s not dinner at the Cohens’. You can’t talk over the anchor!”), keep my legs closed (“Andrew, you were essentially serving up your crotch on that last appearance!”), and to always wear socks, and shoes. (“If I live to be a hundred, I will never, ever get over that you wore flip-flops on the
Today
show! It’s
the
Today
show
!”)

In 2008,
Watch What Happens Live
moved to Rock Center and broadcast as the online companion to Bravo’s final season of
Project Runway
. By then we’d added cocktails to the mix and even booked some non-Bravo celebrity guests to join us. In early 2009, Michael Davies came to Bravo and pitched the idea of bringing the show to the network in late night and moving its home to a small studio he owned in SoHo. Frances and Lauren asked if I’d like to give it a try for twelve weeks at midnight. This time I just said, “Eff yes!” without all the humble bullshit. I met with Davies—again at the Palm—and told him I wanted to keep the format spontaneous, interactive, and simple; the only actual structural beats to hit would be a poll, three “Here’s What” items to discuss at the top, a game, and a Mazel and a Jackhole of the Week.

We used my own furniture (a rug, a few chairs, and a bunch of tchotchkes) to decorate the set (aka “the Clubhouse”), which is modeled after my den in my apartment.

So, my show actually happened gradually and organically—from e-mails, to a blog, to online, to reunion shows, to live at midnight, and then 11 p.m. And had the show failed in that midnight slot? I promise you it would’ve been canceled. Because if there’s one thing I know from my day job as a network executive, sometimes no matter how much you personally love a show, if it is wounded and bleeding, you have to put it down.

Hosting a live, televised interactive cocktail party from my “den” is as fun as it looks—maybe even more. We play games involving cocktails, blindfolds, and wigs. We make up words (e.g.,
para ejemplar
, “Ramotional”). We acquired a pet turtle, named Tramona, who was really into costumed roleplay. One night, we had a blackout on-air right after I gave Patti LaBelle crabs—the crustacean, eating variety, not the pubic type. Another night, the producers secretly changed my copy in the teleprompter and before I realized what was happening, I was obliviously introducing a surprise our booker had orchestrated for me, an appearance by one of my all-time faves, Marie Osmond. (Yes, I welled up—a bucket list moment.) We have a small team, much smaller than any other TV show I’m familiar with, and while we work hard on this informal-seeming little show of ours, we try never to let it
look
hard, and I think that’s part of what people like about it. It’s also a bit of a throwback to the days when a late-night talk show meant a host and a guest in cool-looking chairs, tossing back a few drinks over a conversation that is neither premeditated nor preproduced. Anything can happen, and I love it best when anything does.

Holly Hunter looks on as Ralph Fiennes and I role-play
Harry Potter
in our PJs. In other words, another insane night in the Bravo Clubhouse!

Q:
Is there a Bravo show that is actually more successful than you expected it to be?

A:
Yes. Believe it or not, I thought that
Top Chef
was destined for the disposal before it was even made. With fashion thriving on Bravo in the form of
Project Runway
and
Queer Eye
, Lauren Zalaznick was adamant that we come up with a show that did for food what we’d done for fashion on
Runway
. When I say adamant, I mean that she declared it the singular mandate of my department. I’m not what you’d consider a foodie, having once thrown up after being forced to eat a pea, and I had a stomach full of peas when I contemplated what might happen if our as-yet-unborn cooking show didn’t work.

Top Chef
came to be as a collaboration with Dan Cutforth, Jane Lipsitz, and their team at the Magical Elves, already our partners on
Project Runway
. Throughout the show’s development and production, we debated our central dilemma: how to make an engaging cooking competition when no one at home could taste the food. It was so easy—and interactive—to critique a dress on
Runway
, but is it fun to hear somebody talk about a scallop being too salty? We formatted the show around two challenges—one fun, fast, and skill-based, and the other unexpected, over the top, and often engineered to highlight inter-chef drama.

Days before we were to begin production on Season 1 of
Top Chef
, I found myself in a position that no TV executive ever wants to be in, and one I’m embarrassed to admit I have lived through several times for one reason or another: We didn’t have a host. (For a head judge, Bravo exec Dave Serwatka was pumped about someone who was a newbie to TV: Tom Colicchio, whom Dave called “a chef’s chef.” Tom was wise and direct and pulled no punches.) Not having a host—or a guest—for a show that is days away from production is a very specific kind of hell. It is a hell involving a merry-go-round of just-out-of-reach names and looming failure spinning around your brain while beads of sweat trickle from every nook of your body.

We had our eye on Padma Lakshmi, an Indian American model/actress/writer/presenter and then wife of Salman Rushdie. You couldn’t find a more intriguing combination than that. We began speaking to her, and if you know Padma, you know that she loves to talk, so those discussions went on and on. Bravo loves its beautiful, articulate former-catwalk mavens, and Padma was that and more: She was gorgeous, a world traveler who loved food, had hosted food shows, and knew a lot of chefs. She’d even written her own cookbook,
Easy Exotic
. But she didn’t want to be on a reality show. We sent her
Project Runway
. “Look, it’s Heidi Klum! She did it!” we prodded. She warmed up, we started negotiating, and after a few back-and-forths, we thought we’d landed her. Then, the week before shooting, Padma decided to do a miniseries in India. We were fucked.

With Padma out, I started telling all my friends, and probably some random passersby on the street, that we were looking for a host of what was going to be an
amazing
new show. Full disclosure: At this point, I don’t know if I believed that, but I know I lost more sleep every time Lauren e-mailed me saying, “Who is our host and don’t we start shooting in a few days?”

With (near-literal) moments to spare, I got a call from a publicist at Sony Music who’d represented Billy Joel for years. She said she heard through Marcy Blum, Padma’s wedding planner (go figure), that I was looking for a host. She begged me to meet Billy Joel’s wife, Katie Lee. (Blum planned the Joels’ wedding as well.) “She’s a total foodie, she’s gorgeous, she
loves
food. She’s kind of green and this would be a huge break for her, but she’s a lovely person and you will have a positive experience with her. Can we bring her in?” Katie Lee Joel was as advertised. We hired her.

We learned a lot, and fast, in the first days of
Top Chef
in San Francisco. On the night of the first elimination challenge, the chefs had completed their dishes and were ready to serve the judges—but we needed to get a shot of the finished plates for the “food porn” footage that we show before the entrees are dissected by the judges. While we were taking our time and making sure we had the shots we needed, Tom stormed back to the “video village,” our makeshift control room where producers watch the action. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “The dishes are getting cold! This is completely unfair to the chefs.”

It seemed like a bad harbinger. I turned to Jane Lipsitz and said, “Is this show going to be a total bomb?” The show’s rules were amended that night, and to this day, chefs are required to prepare
two
dishes—one for the judges and one for the food porn. That night, like so many spent on the set of
Top Chef
, stretched on into the next morning and Katie Lee Joel sat waiting to say
Top Chef
’s now-famous dismissal line—“Pack your knives and go”—to the first chef eliminated from the competition, poor Ken Lee. As is still our custom today, the judges and chefs faced off and essentially stared each other down before Katie Lee was to deliver the line. As the director let the chefs “marinate” in the moment, we heard a loud thumping noise coming from the set. Nobody could figure out what it was. Was someone pounding on a door somewhere? Was a piece of equipment failing? Finally the audio guy realized what he was hearing. “That’s Katie’s
heart
!” he screamed. I love a host with a big heart, and Katie Lee felt so bad about having to send anyone home that hers was pounding hard enough to be heard in the sound mix.

The show was a hit, but sadly, viewers didn’t connect with Katie. She was beautiful and incredibly nice, but she was also very young and at the time not directly associated with food, which hurt her credibility as far as viewers were concerned. And, possibly to overcompensate for her youth and sweet Southern accent, we had directed her to appear stern, detached, and robotic on-camera—Klumesque, shall we say. As much as we try to act like we know what we’re doing in TV, everything we ever do is basically an experiment. This one didn’t work.

By Season 2 of
Top Chef
we’d parted ways—amicably—with Katie, and Padma was back in the fold, having completed that so-called miniseries in India, which, with every passing minute, I become more convinced never even existed. Seriously, Padma, if you’re reading this, I’ve checked YouTube and I can’t find even one clip of this “Indian miniseries.”

Q:
What’s been your biggest flop at Bravo?

A:
When I started at Bravo in 2004, I inherited some great shows, such as
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
,
Celebrity Poker
,
Blow Out
, and
Show Biz Moms and Dads
.
Project Runway
was just in postproduction and I loved it right away. I was also enamored with a new show that would become the first I’d supervise and shepherd from birth at Bravo:
Battle of the Network Reality Stars.
And can I just say to everyone at Bravo: Thank you for giving me another chance.