Getty Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna.
Harry Hamlin revealed he has no recollection of filming “Harry Loves Lisa,” his short-lived reality show with his wife, Lisa Rinna.
The future “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” stars headlined their own TV Land docuseries in 2010, but a decade later, Hamlin has erased the experience from his mind.
“I don’t remember anything about shooting ‘Harry Loves Lisa,’” Hamlin told Us Weekly in January 2023. “I never liked the title.”
Hamlin told CNN that he originally pitched for the show to be titled ”I Love Lisa,” but the network “got scared.”
“The truth is, [Harry] when they did the pilot, Harry tested so well,” Rinna added. ‘He went through the roof, and they really wanted to put his name in the title. I said, ‘If you must, okay.’ But that’s really how it started.”
“Harry Loves Lisa” Only Aired For 6 Episodes in 2010
Henry S. Dziekan III/Getty ImagesHarry Hamlin and his wife Lisa Rinna promote their reality series “Harry Loves Lisa” in New York City in 2010.
Hamlin and Rinna have been married for 25 years and share two grown daughters, Delilah Belle and Amelia Gray. In 2010, when their girls were little, they landed their docuseries deal.
The comedic series was touted as a reality show revolving around the family and professional lives of Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna,” but it only lasted six episodes, per IMDb.
At the time, Hamlin told AARP that the goal of the show was to “reinvent” both him and his actress wife “using a new paradigm.”
“We were in the middle of the recession and the world was collapsing around us financially, so we said, “Why don’t we do a show that harkens back to when ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ was on TV?’” he said. “There was a post-war zeitgeist when I was growing up that allowed these kinds of shows to be part of the popular culture, and we thought this might be a good time to reinvestigate that vibe. Reality TV is popular and gets big ratings, and contains a lot of dysfunction and blood on the walls — people screaming at each other and getting drunk and stuff. Our show is very family-oriented, and kind of sweet.”
Hamlin also told Smashing Interviews that four years earlier, the couple had pitched an idea to document the opening of their second boutique, but the mall they were leasing space from wouldn’t allow cameras there, so the project “died.”
“We then went off and did all kinds of other things and then revisited the idea of doing a show,” he explained. “We decided to do one that was kind of a family comedy along the lines of the shows I loved when I was a kid like ‘Father Knows Best,’ ‘Ozzie and Harriet,’ ‘Leave it to Beaver,’ ‘The Brady Bunch,’ and ‘I Love Lucy,’ so we took that and mixed it all together and came up with ‘Harry Loves Lisa.’”
Hamlin said the TV Land series was simply about “all stuff that was going on in our lives at that time.”
“It’s a comedy more than anything else,” he added of “Harry Loves Lisa.”. “There is no blood on the walls, we don’t throw things at each other, and we don’t scream four-letter words at each other.
According to BravoTV.com, “Harry Loves Lisa” started out strong, and its debut was the network’s highest-rated reality TV premiere in several years. Rinna also gushed about the show’s honest look at her marriage. “It’s very open, it’s very honest, it’s very real,” she said.
And so was the title, despite Hamlin’s dislike for it. In January 2023, the actor opened up about his long relationship with Rinna, telling People, “I just love everything about this girl.”
Lisa Rinna Hated Her Final Season on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”
BravoRHOBH’s season 12 cast
Five years after “Harry Loves Lisa” aired its sole season, Rinna signed on to Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise.
In 2015, she told “Oprah: Where Are They Now?” that after she was approached to join the Bravo reality show, she was sure her husband would “never” go for it.
“His initial response? ‘Nope. I’ll divorce you. If you do it, I’ll divorce you,’” she revealed.
But Hamlin later told his wife he changed his mind on her offer and felt the show could be “a good thing” for her career, so she signed on.
Rinna enjoyed her first seven seasons of RHOBH, but following a rocky eighth go-around, she told Interview magazine, “I f***ing hated this year.”
“Something has gotten to the Housewife Universe because of what’s going on in the world, and it’s reflected in the way the fans react to the world of Housewives,” she explained. “And I just think it’s unhealthy. It wasn’t working for me. It wasn’t right for me.”
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