On today’s episode of the Daily Variety podcast, Variety’s Michael Schneider talks about NBC’s 100th anniversary and Variety’s plans to take a hard look at NBC’s role in advancing mass media in the electronic age with the creation of the first radio network. And we bring you highlights from Kate Arthur’s recent conversation with Andy Cohen at Newport Beach TV Fest. The two reflect on the “ongoing documentary project” that is “The Real Housewives” series.
As he works on large-scale projects at NBC, Schneider observes that the value of looking back is in finding patterns and similarities with the present. The mid-1920s, when national broadcasting was born, was a gold rush era driven by emerging technology (thank you, Marconi) and an opportunity to prosper by achieving scale: building networks that covered a much wider area than a single radio station. This was the inspiration for David Sarnoff, the leader of RCA Corp. who drove the launch of NBC, which laid the groundwork for many more firsts.
“You’re talking about parallels to today. At every step, technology changed things. Companies had to evolve,” Schneider says. “I found a great film strip from 1948 that NBC released, “The Dawn of Television,” in which they celebrate the fact that NBC was 22 years old and the amount of progress the national broadcaster had already seen. We just introduced television. And it’s very similar to what we’re seeing today as NBC evolves into not only broadcasting but streaming and other platforms, and as much as that’s changing, some people say things aren’t that way.
In a conversation with Cohen, who is also the host of Bravo’s talk show “Watch What Happens Live,” Arthur emphasized the multiple hyphens when he learned that “Real Housewives” was a long-running, true series. Cohen pointed to an important decision made by former Bravo chief Lauren Zalaznick. (The full video of Orser and Cohen’s session will be published on Variety.com later this week.)
“Lauren Zalaznick changed her 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 she wanted to do it somewhere else. And I thought, “Well, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.” We’re not doing this show anywhere else. 10 cities later, here we are,” Cohen says.
Another turning point occurred when “Real Housewives” in New York was produced from another project.
“We turned the development of a show called ‘Manhattan Mamas’ into ‘The Real Housewives of New York.’ When I said that, it just hit me to the core. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, we can do this in New York.’ And these women can’t get any more… The women in New York and the women in Orange County seemed to speak and live very differently, but they were women, and they seemed to be working on issues that weren’t too far apart. And it worked,” Cohen says.
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