In the past decade and a half, Andy Cohen has become one of the figures most closely identified with the rise of American reality television. As the vice-president in charge of original programming at the Bravo network in the mid-two-thousands, Cohen, who is now fifty-four, developed the enormously successful “Real Housewives” franchise, on whose various iterations—from Orange County to New York, from Beverly Hills to Dubai—he serves as an executive producer, and whose dramatic end-of-season multi-episode reunions he hosts. “I shot the ‘Potomac’ reunion yesterday for almost twelve hours,” he told me the other day. “We started rolling tape at eleven and wrapped at ten-thirty.” (When he got home, he took an edible to “redirect his mind from the cacophony” and went to sleep, only to be awakened at seven by his four-year-old son, Ben, climbing into bed with him.)
Cohen, who grew up in St. Louis and spent the first decade of his career working as a news producer at CBS, leads the hectic life of a media impresario. In addition to executive-producing ten reality shows on Bravo and NBCUniversal, he is also the host and an executive producer of the late-night talk show “Watch What Happens Live,” which has been airing for nearly fourteen years. He has written four best-selling memoirs (a fifth, about his life as a parent, will be out in May) and heads up his own pop-culture-focussed imprint, Andy Cohen Books, at Henry Holt. He also has two SiriusXM channels, Radio Andy and Andy Cohen’s Kiki Lounge, on which he hosts a weekly show, and, for the past five years, he has co-hosted the annual New Year’s Eve coverage on CNN alongside his good friend Anderson Cooper. (In 2021, after being “a bit overserved,” as he later described it, Cohen called Bill de Blasio “the crappiest” mayor of New York on air, leading CNN to prohibit drinking during the 2022 broadcast.)
In late January, I met Cohen—charming, endlessly enthusiastic, both shrewd and truly lovable—at Cafe Cluny, not far from his home in the West Village. As he drank a pot of breakfast tea, we spoke about the highs and lows of the Housewives and about his experience being a gay single dad. (In April of last year, Cohen welcomed, via surrogate, a second child named Lucy.) We also spoke about his fear of—and attraction to—saying the wrong thing, a tendency for which he has become known. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Do you sometimes get tired of the Housewives?
Do you mean, am I over it? Pretty engaged with it still, believe it or not. There are moments that are tiresome, but I’m not tired of it in totality. I can’t believe it’s still going, with no end in sight—the franchise and how many there are. It’s like a Bloomin’ Onion.
The first iteration of the franchise was “Orange County,” in 2006. How did that come to be?
I was in charge of production at Bravo when a man called Scott Dunlop brought a VHS of these women in his neighborhood, and I was, like, Wow, this is interesting. There was no format. There was no nothing. It was an idea. And I was a big fan of the soap-opera genre, a huge “All My Children” fan. I was intrigued, personally, by the idea that the women on the show all went to the same tennis club, and they lived in the same gated community. Pine Valley was a small place, and they all went to the Chateau for a fancy dinner, and they all went to the Glamorama to get their hair done, and so the drama happened in these spots. I was, like, Well, could we localize it in that way? I had this fantasy that we were going to be at the tennis club every day and whatever.
That’s a very nineteen-eighties fantasy of how the rich live. You grew up middle class in St. Louis. Was that aspirational for you in any way?
“All My Children” was aspirational because there were strong, powerful women who dressed well, with big hair. I was, like, Oh, my God, Erica Kane is the fiercest thing I’ve ever seen. And the Housewives were interesting to me. I haven’t really talked about this, but one of the things that titillated me in the early seasons of “Orange County” was that there was a sexuality that I connected with, that I hadn’t seen on reality shows. Certainly on “The Real World” it was teen-agers who were hooking up or whatever, but here were, like, MILFs with huge boobs—
It had shades of eighties porn.
A little bit. I was on Meghan Markle’s podcast recently, and we were debating the way women are portrayed on “Housewives.” I view it as a great feminist tableau, and I know that Camille Paglia does, and I know Roxane Gay does. And I know that Gloria Steinem doesn’t, but I think Gloria Steinem doesn’t watch the show. There’s no show that has given a platform for women over fifty in this way, in terms of expressing their sexuality and who they are and starting over in life and figuring things out. And I think that’s brilliant.
I just wrote about this new reality show, “MILF Manor,” which presents it as a bit pathetic—like, Look at these women with their desperate need to remain young. They’re sexy, and they’re up for anything, but it’s also a little bit delusional.
Do they fuck?
It’s been only one episode.
What’s it on?
TLC.
Oh, that’s a shame. I think that streamers like HBO Max or Netflix should do dating shows that are like Cinemax, if you get the reference.
There should be fucking?
Not that, but it should be soft-core a little bit. A woman who signs up to be on “MILF Manor,” if you put in her contract, “We have the right to show you topless on the show,” would that be a barrier for entry for the applicants of “MILF Manor”? And wouldn’t you possibly add another hundred thousand viewers to the show? Maybe. Let’s take it to the next level.
Would you be interested in doing something like that?
Well, Bravo wouldn’t do that.
Right, but, say, if it weren’t for Bravo.
I think I would go there if I thought the show was going to be a hit. I mean, look, are you asking me if I would produce porn? No, I would not produce porn. Maybe under a pseudonym. [Laughs.] I’m just saying for the producers of dating shows, I think it would be cool to push the envelope on a streamer. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened. I mean, you’re doing a show called “MILF Manor.” Call me crazy.
When did you know you had a hit on your hands with the Housewives?
For me, it really gelled during Season 2 of “Orange County.” Before we started shooting, Jeana [Keough] told the producers she was getting a divorce. And I was, like, clutching my pearls. “Oh, no, Jeana’s gonna get divorced. That’s my friend!” While simultaneously saying, “Wait a minute: Jeana’s getting a divorce, and we’re about to start shooting. So now this is, like, a story: What do her friends think, and is she going to start dating?” And that’s called a soap opera.
Then after “Orange County” came “New York.”
We had this show called “Manhattan Moms” in development. And we were looking at the casting and it was, like, Wait a minute, what if we call this “The Real Housewives of New York City”? And the women were so different from the “Orange County” women. It was like they were from another planet. And then we had “Jersey” and “Atlanta.” “Atlanta” was so groundbreaking. It was the first time you had seen affluent Black women on reality television. And then “Jersey” was, like, Wait a minute, is someone gonna get whacked? They were all so different. I refer to them in my head as airplanes in the sky, and now I have ten planes in the sky, and the goal is to keep the planes in the sky. “Orange County” is just incredible, the fact that we’ve been producing a reality soap opera for sixteen, seventeen years. The flashbacks are so insane. You have Tamra [Judge] talking to her son, this kid who’s now in his thirties, and he’s in high school, fighting with his stepdad, whom she has since divorced. I mean, that’s what they do on soap operas.
But, of course, the difference between a soap opera in Pine Valley and “Orange County” is that these are real people. It’s been more than a decade and a half of “Housewives,” and by now we can see how it’s affected people’s lives.
Well, it’s life. Everything or almost everything that you could imagine has now happened on this show, from federal agents arresting someone to divorces, to when Vicki learns that her mom died, to suicide. Truly monumental things have been captured. So how do I feel? How do I reconcile that? I reconcile it by the fact that these women want to be on television. And so no one is being coerced. They signed up for it. And, by the way, they can get out. They can leave.
Has anyone ever come to you from the Housewives and said—
“This has ruined my life”? Yeah, sure. People have said, “I feel like this was a mistake. This has not been a positive experience for me.” And people have said, “This saved my marriage,” or “I never would have had the courage to leave my husband if I didn’t have the power that I now feel from this platform and the love of the people who watch it,” or “I wouldn’t have had the knowledge that I was in a bad marriage,” or “I wouldn’t have met my current husband.”
At this point, a decade and a half in, what keeps you interested in the Housewives? It can’t be easy doing twelve-hour reunions.
I’m a fan of the show. If I was not a fan of the show, and I was just doing it for money, I would do a bad job. I’m interested in the story. I’m interested in the women. I’m interested in seeing where I can take the interview. I’m interested in seeing if I can sometimes get through to them, if I can challenge them. I try to be a voice of the viewer. That’s what I’m there for. So, going into the “Potomac” reunion, I knew that the viewers felt a certain way about hypocrisy within the group, about how they treat one woman versus another. And so I need to have a sense of my assignment.
You started in news production. Does your current job feel like journalism to you?
In a way. I love interviewing people. And I love interviewing them because I truly can ask them anything. And most likely I’ll get an answer. I started cutting my teeth at CBS News, which was ten years of interviews. And then I was just a TV executive. And now I’m, like, interviewing Housewives. And so I think doing that gave me the balls to then ask celebrities questions that they otherwise would not have ever been asked, when they come on my talk show, “Watch What Happens Live.”
Let’s talk about the show. It has quite a different feel from that of other talk shows.
My goal is that it should feel a little dangerous. There’s no pre-interview, nothing set up. The guests don’t really know what they’re in for. Look, if Hillary Clinton comes on, then her people will approve the games that we’re playing. But, by the way, Hillary Clinton, who’s been on twice—we played “Plead the Fifth” two times. And our rule with “Plead the Fifth,” which is our signature game, is that we do not give the guests the questions. So, you know, if Hillary Clinton is willing to take a trust fall with me . . . There are a lot of people who consider “Watch What Happens Live” way too dangerous. So I consider it a victory when we get someone who’s never done the show before. That’s one of the things that keeps me engaged fourteen years into doing this show. Paul Rudd is doing the show for the first time this week. He’s never been on the show. And that’s, like, a big victory. I want to do something with Paul Rudd that you haven’t seen before.
I had two W.W.E. wrestlers on the other day. And it was so fun, because I know nothing about wrestling. We started the show with just a speed round of questions, like, what do you wear under your singlet? Do you ever get a boner when you’re in the ring? Have you ever peed onstage or in the ring? And it was a new way into wrestling. So I think you’re gonna get a unique experience on the show.
In recent years, have you struggled with this unexpectedness? The fact that you never know what’s going to come out of your mouth?
You mean cancel culture? Yeah, sometimes. I mean, look, there are games that we could play fourteen years ago that we can’t play now. I’m in front of a live microphone for an inordinate amount of time—on my radio show, on the radio channel, on “Watch What Happens Live” and various other places. The potential for me to fuck up is so high. So, yeah, it’s something that I think about. I was hosting a huge fund-raiser at Cipriani a few months ago. And I was sitting there thinking, If I said something insensitive right now, I would lose all my jobs. It was on my mind all night. It’s, like, if I tell [my son] Ben, “Don’t say ‘poopy,’ ” all he wants to do is say “poopy.” Now, I don’t want to say anything insensitive. Of course I don’t, nor do I care to offend anyone.
Does that paralyze you?
It doesn’t paralyze me. Here I am. But it’s certainly something that I need to be mindful of. The truth of the matter is, some nights I leave the show, and I think, You really seemed pervy tonight on the show. And I’ll have to text my executive producer, who has been the same E.P. since Day One, Deirdre Connolly. I’ll text her and be, like, “Was that super pervy of me, what I said?” Because now, you know, I’m in my fifties, I have gray hair, and now I’m a dad, so it doesn’t land the same way. And she will always be honest; she’ll say, “It was fine.” Or she’ll say, “In truth, I was a little skeeved out.” And I’ll be, like, “Oh, God.” And then I have my mother to contend with, who texted me the other night: “No more dick talk on your show.” And we had just actually pre-taped an episode with Theo James and Meghann Fahy, so I go, “Whatever you do, don’t watch Thursday night, because we played ‘Is This Bigger Than Theo’s Prosthetic Dick.’ ” And we were pulling out items. Is this bigger than his prosthetic on “The White Lotus”? So, you know, I’m spinning plates here.
Would you ever go on a reality show?
No. It terrifies me. I wouldn’t want to be a guest on “Below Deck.” I wouldn’t want the cameras shooting me from the side when I have my shirt off. I’m terrified of what I’m going to look like.
But you’re already, in some ways, extremely on mike and on camera.
I’m in charge of the edit. The women of “Housewives” are not in charge of their edit. With my books and with what I share on the radio, and what I share on “Watch What Happens Live,” I’m in charge of what I say and what I don’t. I mean, every so often I’m put on the spot. Theo James the other day, I asked him to describe himself as a lover in three words, and he did. And then he said, “Now you describe yourself.” And I was, like, Fuck, I have to answer this question. I knew that my sister was watching, and I don’t want to talk about sex stuff with my sister! So I said, “Endurant, passionate,” and I can’t remember the third thing.
You got a lot of flack during Donald Trump’s Presidency, with people saying, like, “This is Andy Cohen’s world now. We’re now in reality-TV land.”
Trump was a vile human being long before the Housewives were on the air. So I’m not going to take that on. I mean, listen, the Housewives are low-hanging piñatas for some people. I just debated them with Chris Wallace, and I debated them with Meghan Markle, because I love the show, and because I have my own point of view, and because I know millions of supersmart people who love it, too. Chris Wallace asked me if I was embarrassed of the Housewives, and I said, “Not at all. It brings joy to millions of people.” The discourse about the Housewives is the exact same discourse that used to be about soap operas. I think that it’s a perfect storm of things in our culture that have happened. I think social media has impacted political discourse way more than the Housewives. I would blame Fox News. Look at the way that Fox News was speaking about Obama!
Did you have a sense that you were going to have this media empire?
No. I said yes to everything because I thought, Oh, that’s fun.
I remember reading somewhere that you said you wanted to be famous for being yourself.
My dream was to be able to be myself on TV. So I was, like, I’m gonna be a reporter. Because then, you know, if I’m an anchorman, maybe I could one day host a morning show, where you get to interview famous people, and then there are pockets of the show where you’re, like, “Guess what I did last night,” and I thought that was cool. The fact that I’m able to be authentically myself on my own show was my dream.
You’ve been an observer to celebrity, and also a celebrity yourself, for a while now.
I got famous later in my life, so I was already a fully cooked human being. I was already forty years old, living in New York, and it happened slowly. I started to host stuff on TV; I started to write a blog. And then, because of that, I would get interviewed on CNN. And then one person in five months would say, “Hey, I saw you on CNN!” So it was a very slow build. Now, I also had the benefit of knowing a lot of actors and famous people from covering entertainment, so I saw not only how friends of mine held being famous and how they acted and how they responded to people and how they managed this thing but also how people mismanaged it. I also saw people who I made famous who suddenly turned into total assholes. There’s no guidebook for when you become famous, especially for these real people that we were making famous. It’s hard, and it’s one of the reasons I respect all the Housewives. These people are being judged for shit they’re doing in their own kitchen. And, yes, they signed up for it, but it’s hard.
So I feel like I had the softest launching pad. The coolest thing for me is, I can get into restaurants. And, again, because I’ve lived in this neighborhood for thirty years, I still get a thrill that I can get a restaurant reservation, because I lived in New York for twenty years where I couldn’t.
Do you think you’ve pioneered certain modes of reality television or your talk show or whatever it is that you feel have been ripped off?
The truth is, all talk shows kind of feed off each other, and I think “Watch What Happens Live” owes a great deal to “The Graham Norton Show.” I think, in my early years of “Watch What Happens Live,” I was much more prone to jealousy and insecurity, and I had a different attitude about it than I do now. I feel like, now, if I could say anything to myself in the early days of “Watch What Happens Live,” I’d be, like, “Dude, take a breath. Stay in your lane. Everything’s fine.” And so I think that I just feel grateful to be doing it, which, again, sounds very Scientology or whatever. But, like, I am.
“I am a Scientologist.” [Laughs.]
“I am a Scientologist.” Here’s your scoop. [Laughs.] But, fourteen years into this, I’m so glad it’s still going and we can still do this. So I can’t be always looking around, paranoid. But it did annoy me when I saw a picture of James Corden’s set, because it looked like they did [my] set but actually made it look much better and spent millions of dollars on it. [Laughs.]
Are you worried about losing everything that you’ve built?
No, because I think it’s on my mind so much that this could all get ripped away. I think about it a lot, and I think, because I think about it a lot, it has prepared me, and it’s also made me more grateful for it all being there. And I think, O.K., well, if the Housewives go away, and if the talk show goes away, I have the radio, and if the radio goes away, then maybe my full-time job will be having a book imprint and writing books and raising my kids. And you know what? That would be an amazing job.
It seems like you’re both the grasshopper and the ant in the Aesop fable. Both a fun party guy and someone with his nose to the grindstone.
I’ve always been both. With kids, I can’t be the party guy like I used to be.
So how do you handle it?
How do I party? [Laughs.] At home. Responsibly. And less.
Do you have live-in help?
No. I don’t want someone to live in my house. When I get in my bed at night, I want to be in my place alone with the kids. I had a baby nurse who lived with me, with Ben and then with Lucy, and then she left.
So, if the kids get up at night, it’s you, essentially. That’s a lot for a single parent.
Yeah, but because I had the greatest baby nurse they’ve both been sleep trained, and that makes a huge impact. But, when the baby nurse left, Lucy then started teething. So now I have the monitor on and I’m, like, Googling at three in the morning “How long do I leave the baby crying?” So there was a really rough period.
How did you decide to have a second child?
I did it for Ben, because I’m an older dad, and I’m a single dad, and I want him to feel like he has a family. And if something, God forbid, ever happened to me I don’t want to abandon him. So he and his sister will always have each other. And, by the way, of course I’m so glad I did it, and it’s wonderful, and she’s so cute. And I’m so glad I have a girl now—it’s gonna be so different and a whole new thing, and she doesn’t miss anything going on in the world, and Ben loves her so much.
Do you feel, as a single gay dad, that there is at this point more support for that? Obviously, we live in New York, but is there any hate?
So far, in the two schools that Ben has been in, I’ve been the only single parent and I’m the only gay parent. That has been surprisingly lonely for me. But I’ve got Anderson [Cooper], and Ben sees that Wyatt [Cooper] has two gay dads, and there are two gay dads down the hall from us. I’m trying to do room duty at the nursery school as much as possible, and it’s in my mind a lot. And they’re studying families at school. It’s a really interesting road that you don’t know until you’re living it.
You have to give up certain things when you have kids, too.
It’s a shift, and I think that’s been the gift of having kids late in life. When I had my kids, I was financially in a place where I felt comfortable, but I also got to experience being famous for ten years without having kids. I used to be the guy that had FOMO about missing parties. I wanted to go to the Vanity Fair party every year, and I loved it. It was so exciting. I would fly out for Oscar weekend to go to parties, and you never knew who you were going to meet. And I’m chill now with all of that. There’s a scene in my new book where it’s Lucy’s first night home, and there were two really fun parties that night that I was invited to, one of which was going to have a ton of super-cute guys, and you know I like a party with super-cute guys.
Who doesn’t?
Who doesn’t! But I felt so grounded and whole with myself being at home. I was, like, Wow, this is a family. I have a family, and they’re both here—there’s two little kids here sleeping. And it just felt like I was floating on air, you know? And suffice to say, five years before, I may not have been in that place.
And you might feel different ways about it at different points as a parent, too.
Well, yeah. In August, I felt totally shackled. And I was, like, Wait a minute. I used to be a different person, and fuck my life, and my three-year-old is having tantrums every second and, like, pooping next to the pool, and what is going on?
So, what’s next for Andy?
O.K., so let me plug my book. I’ve always been obsessed with “The Andy Warhol Diaries.” When it came out, in 1989, I was an intern at CBS News, and it was a world that I imagined living in, and then I thought, Oh, my god, I’m hosting a talk show, and I’m in these rooms that I used to imagine. And so I did two books [“The Andy Cohen Diaries: A Deep Look at a Shallow Year,” from 2014, and “Superficial: More Adventures from the Andy Cohen Diaries,” from 2016], and then this year I started writing again on January 1st, and I had just gone off on de Blasio the night before. So that’s the beginning, and when you write a diary of your life, whether you’re publishing it or not, it causes you to think about your life in thematic ways and be introspective about your life, and I’m not currently in therapy, but I’m a hair away from it now that I’m no longer writing this book. [Laughs.] And it kind of allowed me to work through my feelings about being a single dad and the life that I want for the kids, so it was cathartic. It comes out in May.
What else is your imprint publishing?
I published Bevy Smith’s book, this woman I did a show with called “Fashion Queens,” and it’s great, very motivational. On “Married to Medicine,” there’s a Black female gynecologist called Dr. Jackie, and I did a book with her called “The Queen V”; it’s a user’s manual for the vagina. We did Mariah Carey’s memoir—that was huge. We did an oral history of the Housewives, which is excellent. That was a No. 1 New York Times best-seller. Mariah was a No. 1 New York Times best-seller. And we’ll be announcing another huge one soon. It’s only people that I’m interested in. So far, it’s just been women, and so far it’s been women of color, which is interesting. We’re pitched a lot of people, and I don’t do it unless it has the potential to be a best-seller. Either great or a best-seller. Because I want everything to succeed.
Do you ever have self-doubt?
In my early years on “Watch What Happens Live,” I had a lot of self-doubt. I would come home and be, like, Who do you think you are doing this show? You’re not a comedian, you’re not funny. And so I’m glad I got over that. I’ve always had great confidence, but the demons get in your head, and the haters, and social media, and you start being, like, Maybe my eyes are crossed, maybe I am gross, and the studio was so hot in the beginning, so I had a sweating thing, and then if you think you have a sweating thing you sweat more.
Now I have self-doubt about being a dad. If I’m on the playground and I didn’t know that the sprinklers would be on and I didn’t know to bring a change of clothes, I’m, like, How did all these moms know to bring a change of clothes? And I’ll have a crisis of conscience and be, like, I’m a terrible dad. It’s the first year where I’ve been, like, Am I good enough? ♦
