Everything Is Bravo

Bravo was originally founded in 1980 as a commercial-free space largely dedicated to the performing arts, airing operas, ballets, concerts, and art house films. You may recall watching a stage adaptation of Romeo and Juliet there, or catching reruns of its original programming hit, Inside the Actors Studio. But after being purchased by NBC in 2002, the channel had its first flirtation with reality television with the debut of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which proved to be an enormous success. This hit set the network off on a new programming trajectory that would change the face of American television forever.

NBC Chairman and CEO Bob Wright “bragged” to the Washington Post at the time of the acquisition that buying Bravo would give them access to the channel’s “desirable demographic” of “upscale” viewers (the network was available in more than 68 million homes at that point). NBC thought Bravo’s audience would be similar to the one already watching staple programming like The West Wing, Frasier, and Will & Grace, providing the network with an outlet to air its reruns as well as content deemed too risqué for prime time. With the acquisition also came a renewed focus on Bravo’s original programming. On the back of Queer Eye’s unprecedented ratings, the network went on to launch a number of high-profile franchises that spawned their own hugely popular spin-off series in turn, such as Project Runway (2004), Real Housewives (2006), Top Chef (2006), and Million Dollar Listing (2006). By 2006, the New York Times called Bravo “​​the premier gay network, even though it is not labeled as such.” That same year, Bravo also started moving some of its failed programming and launching entirely new series exclusively online, making the network an early adapter to streaming.

As time went on and the popularity of Bravo’s reality TV offerings continued to rise, a cottage industry of unofficial shoulder content popped up surrounding these shows dedicated to recapping, roasting, and debating everything happening on-screen, in addition to the network’s own self-referential programming like Watch What Happens Live! and Couch Talk With Captain Lee and Kate. GIFs and memes, especially from the Real Housewives franchises, have become a social media lingua franca, creating fans of these women who’ve never watched a single episode. The fanaticism surrounding these TV stars has hit such a fever pitch that, in 2019, the network introduced BravoCon, an annual three-day event where fans gladly pay between $550 to $1,200 to attend panels featuring their favorite personalities, walk through a museum of show memorabilia, partake in various branded photo ops, and shop show-themed merch. Even bona fide A-listers are going gaga over these reality stars, like Academy Award winner Jennifer Lawrence, who almost wept when given the opportunity to grab dinner with Real Housewives of New York stars Luann de Lesseps and Bethenny Frankel, or Rihanna, who doled out relationship advice to Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’s Kyle Richards as the pair shopped for cowboy hats in Aspen earlier this year. And Bravo stars have leveraged all of this widespread familiarity to their professional and financial success, using the show as a springboard to infiltrate every aspect of culture, from podcasts to game shows to grocery store shelves—all the way to Broadway and Hulu documentaries. At this point, even the US penitentiary system has gotten a taste of the _Real Housewives_ treatment.

As New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry, who has interviewed Cohen and others in the pages of the highbrow magazine, tells me, Bravo’s position within pop culture “has never been more prominent. The divide between real celebrities and Bravo celebrities has gotten thinner.”

One of the reasons the network has found so much success is its decision not to follow the blueprint set by channels like the Food Network, which focus on a specific content niche, but instead create a signature brand personality and point of view that can be applied to a wide array of programming. That directive is credited to the network’s president from 2004 to 2013, Lauren Zalaznick, who spoke directly to Bravo’s “upscale” viewer demographic by giving them reality shows based in major metropolitan areas and focused on the exclusive worlds of fashion, hair salons, restaurants, art galleries, gyms, real estate, and upper-class families. This genre of highbrow-meets-lowbrow programming was also designed to assure the Bravo viewer of their own superior tastes and opinions, making them armchair experts in these various hoity-toity fields. Fry explains that it became the channel “for the more sophisticated, cosmopolitan viewer who wanted to see people who were unhinged enough to be on reality TV, but not too unhinged.”

According to a 2008 profile in the New York Times, Zalaznick also relied heavily on her young head of original programming and development, Andy Cohen, to keep her finger on the pulse of what was cool and happening in culture at the time. Cohen quickly made a name for himself at the network, proposing outrageous reality show plot twists that one colleague in the article deemed “a little gratuitous.” That attitude would become a defining characteristic of the network’s programming in the years to come. Cohen’s pioneering, boundary-pushing—allegedly, law-breaking—vision for Bravo would be rewarded in 2009 with his own late-night talk show, Watch What Happens Live! With Andy Cohen, a show that would finally make a star out of the network’s star-maker. (Cohen has recently been dealing with two lawsuits, one of which accuses him of failing to stop behavior described as “racially offensive.” As reported by the The Wall Street Journal, this lawsuit has been withdrawn but “remains pending in private arbitration.” The second lawsuit alleges he used drugs with members of the Real Housewives cast.)

For decades, reality TV has been branded as trashy; the premier destination for mediocre people who are desperate to be famous by any means necessary. A perception that pioneers of the medium, MTV and TLC, helped create with their focus on the weirder, messier side of reality with shows like A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila, Jersey Shore, Octomom, Breaking Amish, and I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. Both channels’ content had an emphasis on shock and titillation, whereas Bravo played more to its stars’ humanity, making these unrelatable figures oddly relatable and thus giving them greater cultural staying power.

And, as it turns out, these quintessential Bravo stars—like Bethenny Frankel, Thomas Ravenel, Lisa Rinna, Tom Sandoval, or even Andy Cohen himself—aren’t just particularly attention-starved individuals, but early examples of what any of us would do given a platform and a captive audience; a harbinger of what social media would soon turn so many of us into for a lot less money and notoriety. Because shortly after Bravo became must-see TV circa 2006, came the ubiquity of smartphones, complete with a video camera and infinite apps upon which to share that content.

Today, social media, with its eternal promise of fame, racking up followers, and easy money, has created a generation of micro reality stars endlessly vying for our attention (and also existing as our competition, in the way that we’re all really just one viral post away from stumbling into influencer-dom). For younger generations, sharing on these platforms comes as second nature. Thanks to being born into this dual reality, Gen Z and Gen Alpha have a very different relationship to the self, one that is mediated through screens. They are hyperaware of both the camera and how they appear on it. They are no longer just who they perceive themselves to be, but how others perceive the projection of themselves they’ve curated for their consumption. While living in a society has always entailed a performance of the self to a certain extent, for many online, it’s now become hard to know where that performance ends and the real person begins, especially when your audience remains eternally present.

The watchful eye of our smartphones, and the millions of potential real eyes it represents, has also made all of us highly cognizant of both the real and imagined gaze fixed on us at all times. But not even Lacan could have foreseen the way that being endlessly perceived and surveyed by our own technology would warp our understanding of our own identity. With these imaginary spectators hanging on our every word, our lives are reduced to performance, mining our realities for content in the same way a reality star curates their existence for our viewing pleasure. As Nora Ephron said, “Everything is copy,” and she hadn’t even met a professional livestreamer yet.

Plus, when an audience is always watching, every choice we make becomes no longer an expression of preference, but rather an act of branding, further defining and redefining what we are and are not for our parasocial besties. We even go so far as to do free PR on these products’ behalf, tagging the brand in the hopes of getting noticed and further legitimizing our influencer status via engagement with the company’s account—a tactic well-known to D-list reality stars everywhere fishing for a sponsorship deal. Just look at the way Real Housewives of New York star de Lesseps leveraged her relationship with Jovani to her own extreme financial gain. In 2018, the reality star took a handful of free dresses the brand loaned her to perform in and turned them into a full-fledged plot point on the show after her drunken castmate Dorinda Medley heckled her by repeatedly yelling “Jovani” during her act. De Lesseps then incorporated that hugely popular meme back into her cabaret act, debuting a single titled “Feelin’ Jovani,” a song which she went on to perform (while wearing Jovani, of course) on Watch What Happens Live! as a handful of drag queens (also wearing Jovani) strutted the catwalk in one huge plug for the 40-year-old brand previously best known as a purveyor of prom dresses.

Living under the smartphone’s constant surveillance has also transformed the way many of us present ourselves in real life. There’s now a desire to look fully camera-ready at all times, which makes sense considering you could actually be called upon to film a friend or stranger’s video at any given moment. The same way a Housewife might begin a day of filming by pretending to wake up in bed with a full blowout and lashes already on. By always appearing on a reality show in very heavy glam, these women (along with the Kardashians, reality stars from Bravo’s NBCUniversal sister network E!) have also helped convince the masses that stage makeup is perfectly suitable for everyday activities. Contouring, baking, and setting spray, once exclusively the tools of professional makeup artists working with on-air talent, are now such commonplace practices that every middle schooler in America could teach you how it’s done.

These reality shows have also greatly helped normalize plastic surgery, destigmatizing this once taboo topic by taking cameras inside the doctor’s office for everything from an injectable tune-up to a gnarly breast augmentation surgery. These ladies’ trips to their cosmetic doctors are treated like any other errand on their to-do list, just another plotline to keep themselves young and relevant. As the first show in the franchise, The Real Housewives of Orange County set the precedent for this type of medical content, showcasing everything from Tamra Judge’s thousandth Botox appointment and a black-eyed Alexis Bellino immediately post-nose-job, to Jeana Keough taking cameras inside the pre-op room before her facelift surgery. In fact, this is such a common occurrence on the show, the Bravo website even has a video playlist titled “RHOC’s Unforgettable Plastic Surgery Moments.”

Bravo operates as a kind of bougie tourism board, especially via its Housewives and Below Deck series, giving audiences a very luxe, insider look at how the upper class operate in various remote locales. Locales that, more often than not, Bravo has filmed at in the past, creating the illusion that these are the go-to destinations for the one percent when in reality they’re just places the network has preestablished promotional deals with and can secure steep discounts for filming there. The montages of high-end dining, luxury resorts, and penthouse apartment living further flatten these cities and vacation destinations into a rich person’s caricature of those very real environments. The same way a well-edited TikTok of an influencer’s day reduces the difficult reality of living in a major metropolis into a sizzle reel of highly aestheticized moments and high-price purchases designed to make your life feel lesser than. Much like reality television, social media also very much rewards this flaunting of extreme wealth and excess with more views, clicks, and cash. And when we are seeing everyone from these very aspirational Bravo figures to more “relatable” influencers indulging in that type of behavior, it in turn starts to normalize that level of grotesque consumption for the rest of us.

Not only have we adopted the appearance of reality stars, but our social media content has even started mimicking the editing and plotline formulas beloved by the Bravo-verse. After all, what is TikTok if not an endless stream of Real Housewives confessionals? The “Get Ready With Me” format mimics much of what we find most comforting about our favorite trash TV, following a stranger around as they perform extremely mundane activities. In addition to both formats narrativizing domesticity, TikTok also helped put language to the very online affliction that is “main character syndrome”—the belief that you’re the protagonist in life, making everyone else a side character or a villain. This antisocial perspective is very much reinforced by social media where you are actually incentivized to think that way, just as you are on every reality show that’s ever existed.

The format of TikTok storytimes also closely follows the construction of reality programming. The narrator, speaking directly to camera, will drag out the plot, repeating and adding extraneous details to force people into watching for longer only to needlessly break up the story into multiple installments in order to maximize engagement and revenue. Even just a slightly off interaction with the barista that morning can become fodder for a four-part series complete with asides to answer questions about your skin-care routine and where people can buy your sweatshirt. And just like on reality TV, the antagonist in the story also has an opportunity to clapback by posting their own response video, suddenly creating a dramatic narrative out of thin air. A petty beef guaranteed to get both parties way more views, followers, and money, which only further encourages this type of online behavior. In the same way, the majority of the most beloved and successful characters in Bravo history also happen to be its most problematic provocateurs.
Just look at all the money, ratings, and free press Vanderpump Rules star Sandoval has raked in over the past year since very publicly getting caught cheating on his girlfriend and castmate, Ariana Madix, leading to the cultural juggernaut that was Scandoval. It’s a moment that Fry says also “showed how central Bravo has become. It was almost monocultural.” At that storyline’s height, more than 4.5 million viewers tuned in.

If reality TV has taught us anything over the last 20 years it’s that it’s always far more lucrative to play the villain than the hero. Screen time is screen time, and without the antagonists these shows and social media platforms wouldn’t have any of the drama or action that makes them such a perennial topic of conversation. And this screen time begets even more screen time as these moments go viral and cross out of the Bravo-verse into the wider world of pop culture and these TV moments take on a life of their own. Like Sonja Morgan starring in a Telfar campaign for PAPER magazine which she then turned back into content for the show, throwing a party for herself to celebrate the advertorial that caused enough drunken fights to fuel the plot for the rest of the season. Or Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore reenacting a scene from The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City on Watch What Happens Live!, elevating one of many fights between Lisa Barlow and Monica Garcia to an Oscar-caliber performance.

As a culture primed on the conflict of Bravo shows, we’re addicted to stories filled with trivial gossip, dissecting these interpersonal moments at length with friends, family, and followers, and taking up one side of the argument or the other. As a result, these frivolous stories blow up into nationwide debates on decorum and innuendo, such as the very divisive conversations surrounding Couch Guy or Hoodie Girl. We can see TikTok do this with the most minor of pop culture events as well, like Selena Gomez’s whispered conversation with Taylor Swift at the Golden Globes. A passing moment was dissected from every conceivable angle, debated about in the comment section for days, and launched the social media careers of thousands of professional lip-readers.

In addition to every social media user weighing in on these types of trivial exchanges, causing them to reach Watergate proportions of media scrutiny, creators have also realized the immense power inherent in simply pissing people off. This can run the gamut from being flagrantly ignorant about really run-of-the-mill stuff—as the woman on TikTok who didn’t know she can eat the lemons that grow on trees recently learned—to intentionally spreading low-stakes, bad-faith takes, as exemplified by pretty much every viral tweet ever. You can also see this in the outsized, context-less indignation caused by a recent TikTok of Anna Wintour leaving a fashion show early, something she has done for the last 40 years in order to make it from one runway show to the next on time, or the drummed-up drama on accounts like Diet Prada, which made its name by regularly accusing fashion designers of plagiarism while leaving no room for the nuanced reality of how the industry actually works.

But rage-baiting doesn’t always have to be this subtle to make someone the subject of the internet’s ire. There are also much more overt instigators, like the TikTokers who stage outrageous Karen interactions or hurtful conversations with their partners. This approach to social media virality also speaks to a broader attitude online in favor of raising one’s profile by any means necessary. Even if the notoriety makes you infamous, at least people are still talking. Cardi B may have won her $4 million defamation lawsuit against YouTuber Tasha K, but that legal battle also generated tons of press coverage and put their names in the same conversation, likely introducing Tasha to a much, much wider audience than she was originally speaking to.

In a lot of ways, Bravo has also helped prime the American public for our current era of rampant disinformation. The network’s programming only offers the guise of reality when, in truth, it’s all highly staged and scripted to maximize our entertainment. As we’ve begun to understand how these TV programs are actually constructed, it seems we’ve also become increasingly suspicious of the media we consume as a whole.

Of course, former President Donald Trump, a reality star by trade, introduced the masses to the concept of fake news using the same deny-and-obfuscate tactics used by so many Housewives under attack before him. That seed of doubt has now grown into a much larger conversation about the way all forms of media can be biased and are often designed to elicit a particular reaction from the person consuming them. The same way Bravo might give one of its stars a good or a bad edit that season depending on the role they want them to play.

As our media literacy continues to grow and we understand more acutely how fame operates, the public’s relationship to top-tier celebrities has also shifted. Not only are fans suddenly favoring blind items over traditional tabloids in the pursuit of uncovering some mysterious, hidden truth about these people, but every aspect of their lives is now accused of being a PR stunt. Every celebrity relationship is a showmance, every traumatizing incident a fictionalized story for the press to dine out on, and every candid paparazzi shot actually a highly orchestrated meetup. While there might be a germ of truth to some of these suspicions, they only further serve to legitimize all of the more far-flung beliefs about how Hollywood operates and encourages the public to delve further into these types of fringe media conspiracy theories.

It also doesn’t help that we increasingly can’t trust what we’re seeing with our own eyes as artificial intelligence and deepfakes test our ability to discern between the digital and physical world. Our reality has become about as real as the shows we watch on Bravo.

And in a world now indistinguishable from the network, Bravo has been elevated to something more akin to a religion than a TV channel, making Andy Cohen its de facto deity. (He did play God in a Lady Gaga music video, after all.) The executive producer wields the ultimate authority to turn housewives into household names, to designate them as hero or villain in the editing suite, or cast out these supplicants entirely from the garden of Eden that is primetime programming. Fry calls him “an impresario,” a “unifying figure” for a vast media monolith that “reaches every nook and cranny of our culture right now.”

“Seeing him at a Bravo party or a screening or some sort of Housewives premiere, which I’ve had the opportunity to see several times, even seeing him on Watch What Happens Live! with the crowd, just seeing him work the room is really instructive because he knows to turn it on,” Fry says. “He’s very charming and savvy, and he knows how to make people feel good. But he knows that his role is.” It’s Cohen’s Bravo-verse and we’re all living in it.