Here's What Happens At TV's Most Exclusive Clubhouse
On a hot July night in 2009, in a sliver of a TV studio in a nondescript office building just west of Soho, Watch What Happens Live made its TV debut. After a particularly heated first season of Real Housewives of New Jersey, host Andy Cohen sat down with inaugural guest and lightning rod for drama Danielle Staub, who was on the other end of Teresa Giudice's legendary finale table flip. During their live interview a week after the season ended, Cohen asked Staub everything from whether she’d had an eyebrow lift (ask a plastic surgeon to "put this to rest," she suggested), to whether or not the rumors were true about her alleged connection to the Colombian drug cartel (check her arrest papers, she offered). There was also a Skype chat with The Fashion Show contestant Reco Chapple, a celebrity “booty call” with Cohen's BFF Sarah Jessica Parker, and a lot of upper lip sweat. Most of those early staples, particularly the derided perspiration, are long gone — except Cohen's ability to get legitimate answers to uncomfortable questions.
Danielle Staub on Watch What Happens Live's first episode.
Bravo / Getty Images
Cohen, the enigmatic godfather of the Real Housewives franchise, and a staff of four pulled off TV's still only live late-night show in less than a month. "We only prepped for the show for three weeks before we went live," executive producer Deirdre Connolly remembers. “We really didn't have proper air conditioning. The lights went out, Andy was sweating a lot, but it made it kind of fun, and feel really authentic, like we were starting this unique experience.”
Eight years later, Cohen is now the voice and face of Bravo, which is all thanks to Watch What Happens Live.
In the early 2000s, Cohen, then a Bravo executive, had a habit of sending dishy emails around to other execs at the network about their series, like Battle of the Network Reality Stars and Project Runway. It wasn't long before Lauren Zalaznick, head of Bravo at the time, told Cohen to turn his cheeky commentary into a blog for Bravo. As shows like Top Chef and Real Housewives of Orange County started to take off in 2006, Zalaznick and Bravo's general manager, Frances Berwick, pushed Cohen to take on more on camera duties, including an online aftershow.
Watch What Happens Live, named after Bravo’s tagline at the time, started as just that for Top Chef in 2007. It streamed on Wednesdays from the CNBC headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and served as an extension of Cohen's blog. If it weren’t for the web series, he may not have been the host of all of those epic Housewives reunions. "Andy already had a big social media following and presence," Connolly says. "He's so connected to pop culture, he's so connected to Bravo."
The cocktail menu for the audience.
Megan Mack for BuzzFeed News
Michael Davies, a producer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, took notice of the aftershow, and two years after it launched online, he offered the Watch What Happens Live team a small studio to give the show a try on air. At that point, the web series was already incorporating on-camera cocktails, which have remained a staple, and non-Bravo celebrity guests.
Davies' plan was for the show to air once a week at midnight for 12 weeks, allowing Cohen and the crew to continuously experiment. “One great thing about live TV, for better or for worse, is that once it's done, it's done — there's no going back,” says co-executive producer Caissie St. Onge, who's been with the show since those early days.
Their initial space was "so tiny that we were actually physically on top of each other," according to Connolly. The control room was more of a designated corner outside of the studio, open to all who walked by. The offices surrounding the area, including Connolly's, doubled as greenrooms, the floor-to-ceiling windows allowing passing glances at a Real Housewife clutching a desk for composure while changing before the show. Cohen’s dressing room was basically a closet right next to the set doors, and inside the studio, there were two rows of benches and some folding chairs wherever there was room to seat an audience of 22. The clubhouse, modeled after the den in Cohen's own West Village home, was an apt name for the original Watch What Happens Live set.
A few of Andy's Clubhouse tchotchkes.
Megan Mack for BuzzFeed News
“All the things that we felt were disadvantages I think became huge advantages to us,” Connolly says, including their original space. And little by little, the experimenting paid off. A gift from Jimmy Fallon would turn into the weekly shotski segment, where Cohen and his guests take shots from a ski with glasses glued to it. A game to get Real Housewives of Atlanta star Kandi Burruss to spill dirt, “Plead the Fifth” — during which guests are asked three hardball questions, and can only decline to answer one — would turn into the show’s most newsworthy segment. (It was during rounds of the game, which Bravo has since turned into an app, that Cameron Diaz admitted she’s swum in the lady pond — Cohen's euphemism for hooking up with another woman — and in another, Joe Jonas gave his choices for Shag, Marry, Kill between his famous exes Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato, and Gigi Hadid.)
Cameron Diaz plays Plead the Fifth.
Bravo
Watch What Happens Live grew to two nights in September 2010, and then three, and eventually, after a test run, it officially went to five nights a week in January 2012. Each upgrade made St. Onge say to herself, “Oh, this is, like, a success."
And soon, other networks followed in the show's self-promotional footsteps. (See AMC's Talking Dead, HBO's After the Thrones, and many others.) “We own it,” Cohen says, referring to Watch What Happens Live's tendency to feature their own talent and programming. “That's what we are a couple nights a week and then a few other nights a week we're not, so it's kind of everything, and I think it's where the world is.” The series typically covers the tentpole Bravo shows the first half of the week (it goes live on Sundays instead of Fridays to recap shows like Real Housewives of Atlanta the same night they air) and A-list celebrity guest duos the second half of the week (a recent week paired Sally Field and Katie Couric, and Anne Hathaway with Sheryl Crow).
But after nearly a decade in that Soho-adjacent studio, Watch What Happens Live outgrew its space, literally and figuratively. The little late night show that could moved on up into a bigger studio and an open floor plan office two floors higher in that same building in January 2017. BuzzFeed News stopped by on a cold Monday in January to see how it all comes together.
A view of the new studio before guests and audience arrive.
Megan Mack for BuzzFeed News
1:12 p.m. The producers are running on high after a feat the night before: Twitter's king and queen, John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, posted on social media about watching the episode, featuring Vanderpump Rules star DJ James Kennedy, and then wound up calling in.
While the rest of the staff is starting to get nestled in at their desks on the new floor, where they've been for weeks now, Connolly, in a black sweater with a satin black collar poking out neatly at the top, arrives two floors below. Her office upstairs is not ready yet, so there she sits, just her and her assistant, Rachel Titen, as the last remnants of the old studio. In her office turned greenroom turned office, Connolly spends the early part of her day in company executive meetings and on conference calls about PR, production, marketing, ad sales, etc., as well as watching and reviewing cuts of upcoming Bravo shows like the Ladies of London finale, which WWHL will air a clip of tonight.
1:23 Meanwhile, St. Onge arrives fresh from her Connecticut commute, platinum blonde hair held back in a voluminous ponytail (a long tenet of Watch What Happens Live is appreciation for a good ponytail). She is zeroed in on production, “building the show and putting the parts together and making sure everybody has everything they need for the part of the show that they're responsible for,” she explains.
But there is a lot of overlap, given that Watch What Happens Live is a very collaborative environment and “still a pretty lean staff compared to a lot of TV shows,” St. Onge notes. “I don't think that there's any job here that not everybody could do.”
1:55 The majority of the WWHL staff come in by 2 p.m., which is when the talent department, which consists of senior talent producer Robyn Baum, supervising producer Dori Kornspan, and talent associate producer Anthony Lella, really gets going. Baum, dressed in a loose light-gray cardigan draped over a white T-shirt, picks up the phone at her desk, her brown hair hanging over her shoulders. She and Kornspan start their day planning future bookings, while Lella checks in with the day's guests and their publicists to establish himself as their main contact for the evening's show.
"There were never any parameters and still isn't.”
Today Lella has it easy though: It's one of their Bravo nights with Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast members Lisa Rinna and Eileen Davidson booked. They're regulars at the clubhouse, Rinna having been on a whopping 12 times. WWHL gives Housewives and other Bravolebrities a chance to defend themselves live, which is likely why Rinna — who's made jokes about Xanax smoothies and who told new cast member Eden Sassoon that former cast member Kim Richards was losing her battle to addiction and “close to death” this season — has been on so often.
With Bravolebrities, “it's like having a family member there often," St. Onge says. "A lot of them are really, really good sports” — including Rinna, who, during her visits to the show, has admitted to eating pot brownies and hooking up with a soap star.
Robyn Baum and Anthony Lella in a preshow meeting.
Megan Mack for BuzzFeed News
2:01 With tonight's guests, the research team — research producer Nick Rizzo, research associate producer Mariah Smith, story associate producer Danny Visconti, and story producer Megan Tuohy — is focused on finding fun and creative ways to address the issues going on this season on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. For instance, they use a clip of Davidson and Rinna’s former castmate Brandi Glanville disparaging Rinna the last time she was on WWHL in order to get a stronger reaction from Rinna than they would have had they just used a viewer tweet.
With high-profile guests though, the research team has gone to incredible lengths to find clips, photos, and items that even the celebrity guests themselves likely have forgotten about. Each of their desks has a double monitor setup, one screen on work, one screen streaming a Bravo or news program (today Rizzo has on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills while Visconti is tuned to MSNBC). They build research dossiers for Cohen and the crew, aiming to create "something that you could hand to a stranger, like a third-grader, and they could read it and be like, ‘I have all the relevant info and I could write an essay on this person practically.’ Like an outline of their life,” Smith says of the preparation for brand-new guests. “If they're a return guest, we fill the most important gaps between when they were previously on” and now, she says. They watch as many video clips of their guests as they can find, jump back years into a guest’s social media accounts, and read through dozens of interviews, pinpointing tidbits that could make for a great Plead the Fifth question.
Watch What Happens Live office atmosphere.
Megan Mack for BuzzFeed News
2:56 While the research team is building Housewives dossiers, Baum looks ahead toward booking some non-Bravolebrities, like Love & Basketball legend Sanaa Lathan. Typically, she and Kornspan schedule guests two months out, and Lathan's latest show, Shots Fired, has a late March premiere date.
While booking was difficult initially for the midnight cable talk show (Baum says in those days, her job was “a lot of explaining to people what the show was”), things changed by the time they were on five nights a week. Suddenly, famous Bravo superfans, like Jennifer Lawrence and Tina Fey, approached them to come on the show, and to push their new projects, peaking with Meryl Streep in 2012, who was promoting Hope Springs.
“The studio wanted her movie to reach female viewers, and she knew this was the way to do it,” Cohen says. “So that was a turning point.” Using Streep as a calling card “opened up the gates” to book higher-profile, more elusive guests, Baum notes, citing Cher, Oprah Winfrey, and Mariah Carey as examples. These days, the celebrity guests are a healthy mix of people who want to come on the show to have fun, whether they're plugging something or not.
Meryl Streep on the show in 2012.
Bravo
And when the talent team does lock in a huge celebrity, the research team has a lot of digging to do. "We take a lot more time with them because their career, it's massive," Rizzo says. Referring to Streep, he notes, “She's doing every talk show. What are we going to do that will be like no other show?”
He also remembers trying to find footage of Connie Britton in one of her high school plays when she was a guest in 2013. “I was just calling up schools [in Virginia] and trying to figure out exactly who would have any sort of video,” Rizzo says. “And I got the high school drama teacher, and he was like, ‘I don't have any video footage, but I do have her Playbill,’ and he sent it to us, and it's not a normal Broadway Playbill. It was an 8×10, huge, of just Connie Britton with the whole Hello Dolly! getup.”
3:28 Baum, Kornspan, and Lella are looking at who might be in town promoting projects in the next two months. They create a list of possible talent, keeping in mind who's expressed interest in coming on the show and who's a known Bravo fan. Then they start unpacking the puzzle that is pairing guests.
The most important question they ask each other is: “Is it good weird or is it bad weird?" “You can’t really know,” Baum says. “Which is scary, but then it’s so satisfying, you know, to see people hitting it off.” Lella's favorite thing is “when people come on and they're paired and then they become friends,” citing success stories like Chloë Grace Moretz and Meghan Trainor, and Jenny McCarthy and her now-husband Donnie Wahlberg, who met for the first time as guests on WWHL in 2012. If Ethan Hawke had been in Wahlberg’s seat instead, a real possibility that week, “things would be very different,” Baum says.
Jenny McCarthy and Donnie Wahlberg, now married, met on the set of Watch What Happens Live in 2012.
Bravo / Getty Images