Andy Cohen Explains Surprising ‘Real Housewives’ News

Getty Images Andy Cohen is speaking out about the RHONY news.

Andy Cohen is explaining how the RHONY: Legacy show turned into its very own season of “The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip.”

Fans have been waiting for some big news to come out of the Big Apple, and we now know that there’s a specific reason that Cohen and Bravo producers went the way they did with Legacy.

“The women really, there’s been so much written about the contract negotiations, the RHONY Group, as I say in my book,” Cohen said on the May 16, 2023, episode of his SiriusXM radio show.

“We were negotiating with them to shoot RHONY: Legacy as kind of another version of them in the city and really what came out was, for better or for worse, I was talking to Luann during negotiations and she was like, ‘Can’t we go away on a trip together?'” Cohen added.

Here’s what you need to know:

Andy Cohen Says the OG RHONY Ladies Signed on to Do the Show ‘Very Quickly’

In March 2022, Cohen told Variety that RHONY was set to be rebooted. His plan was to completely recast the show for season 14 while still coming up with a plan to keep some of the original personalities on television by way of a Legacy spinoff.

“You know that we’re at a crossroads for RHONY. We’ve spent a lot of time figuring out where to go. And the plan that we’ve come up with, I think, is a real gift to the fans,” he told the outlet. Then, at BravoCon 2022, Cohen revealed the all-new RHONY cast, though some fans were disappointed because there really wasn’t any news about Legacy.

In January 2023, Page Six reported that Bravo had “lost interest” in the Legacy idea. The reason? Supposedly the cast wasn’t happy with the contract negotiations. Flash forward to Cohen’s RHUGT announcement, and he says the women had a totally different attitude when it came to inking deals to appear on the spinoff show.

“It seemed like what the women really wanted was not to do another, and I think Dorinda will back me up here, I don’t know that I talked to Dorinda about it personally, but I know that we then said, ‘Well, what if we do a girls’ trip?’ They all, it was very quick. They all signed on very quickly, so this is also partially what they wanted from the Legacy experience, which I think is great,” Cohen told his Radio Andy listeners.

The RHONY Women Seem Excited for Their Own UGT

The cast of RHONY Legacy Ultimate Girls Trip was announced at the NBCU upfronts on May 15, 2023. The cast will include Kelly Bensimon, Luann de Lesseps, Dorinda Medley, Sonja Morgan, Ramona Singer, and Kristen Taekman and the ladies will film in St. Barths.

Some of the women have spoken out about the announcement on social media and seem really excited for what’s to come.

Ramona Singer posted to her Instagram Stories on May 16, 2023 to say that she’s “excited” for what’s ahead. “It’s going to be so, so iconic,” she said.

Meanwhile, Dorinda Medley shared a photo of some of the OG cast members who will be filming the new show. “We’re Back!” she captioned an Instagram post on May 15, 2023.

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