Getty Andy Cohen.
Andy Cohen opened up about The Real Housewives franchise, revealing that he “can’t believe” it’s still on the air.
In a February 2023 interview with The New Yorker, the Bravo host said he is far from “over” and still “pretty engaged” with the long-running reality franchise, which made its debut in 2006 with “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”
“There are moments that are tiresome,“ he admitted, “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.”
Andy Cohen Said the Real Housewives Replaced Soap Operas
Randy Shropshire/BravoCrystal Minkoff, Kyle Richards, Dorit Kemsley, Erika Girardi, and Lisa Rinna in RHOBH season 12.
Cohen revealed that when the idea for a show about women who live in the same neighborhood was first brought to him, it made him think of the soap opera “All My Children.”
“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,” he said of the ABC daytime drama based in the fictional town of Pine Valley.
He then came up with the idea of trying to “localize” the concept for an unscripted show. Cohen even dreamed the future Real Housewives stars would emulate Erica Kane, the veteran “All My Children” character played by Susan Lucci from 1970 until the show’s end in 2008.
In the interview, Cohen pointed out that because shows like “The Real Housewives of Orange County” have been on for so long, fans have seen the cast members’ kids grow up in front of their eyes — kind of like actors who appear on soap operas.
“The flashbacks are so insane,” he said of The Housewives shows. “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.”
This is not the first time Cohen has made the comparison between the Housewives and soaps. According to People, in the 2020 TV special “The Story of Soaps,” Cohen noted that the goals for both TV genres are to “educate” and “entertain.”
“We’re voyeurs, but we also love stories,” he added. “We want to be entertained, and I think that the ultimate expression of voyeurism is reality television. … I think that the Housewives have replaced soap operas because truth is stranger than fiction.”
He added that old-school soap operas “became kind of unnecessary because you could do it with real people” who were coming up with drama-filled storylines on their own.
While they used to dominate the weekday schedules on all three major TV networks, soap operas have disappeared from the landscape in a big way in the years since The Real Housewives debuted. According to TV Series Finale, “The Young & the Restless,” “The Bold & the Beautiful” and “General Hospital” are the only network soaps remaining today.
Andy Cohen Credited the Real Housewives for Giving Women Over 50 a Platform
Getty ImagesSonja Morgan.
Cohen also revealed that he considers the Housewives as “a great feminist” platform for older women. “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,” he told the New Yorker.
In November 2022, Cohen made a similar comment while speaking on Meghan Markle’s Spotify podcast, “Archetypes.”
“I think the ‘Housewives of New York,’ to me, in a crazy, crazy way, is actually one of the most feminist shows on TV,” he said at the time. “It’s about women who are over 50, close to 60, who are so in touch with their sexuality, but they don’t need men to define them and they’re in control.”
While Lucci, 75, worked on “All My Children” until she was in her 60s, she doesn’t agree with Cohen’s assessment that the Real Housewives shows are anything like soap operas.
“I don’t think they are the modern-day soaps,” the Daytime Emmy winner told Page Six in 2020. “There’s no storytelling. There’s a lot of editing. It’s, like, they cut to the chase all the time, and I think it’s different.”
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