"We didn't know," Cohen said, shrugging off the show's liability.
Shortly after this "news" came out, Staub guest-hosted an hour of the "Today" show with Hoda Kotb. (That's what attention gets you these days.) Cohen worked the show too, sometimes ID'd as an employee of the network and sometimes just as a "pop culture expert."
Cohen came from the news divisions of CBS and moved into producing entertainment for CBS News' "The Early Show." (From there he went to Trio, and then over to Bravo.)
At Bravo, they don't go for mass -- though mass is nice when it comes along -- they go for rich. And have found it. Their programming ranges from the fairly highbrow (the forthcoming Sarah Jessica Parker-produced reality series about visual artists) to the unashamedly lowbrow (where Cohen does his lady-wrangling).
"If anything is Bravo, it is a place of unironic, unjudgmental but opinionated fun," said Zalaznick, Bravo's overseer as the head of NBC Universal's women and lifestyle entertainment networks.
She contrasted Cohen with all those nasty bloggers on the Internet. "He's a knowing enthusiast, and it's not that he won't give you an opinion on taste or propriety or 'I like' or 'I don't like' -- it's just that he doesn't seem to need to put that opinion out in the world for any betterment of himself," she said.
The network, though, undermines this message regularly. For one small instance: Bravo's on-screen bug that has been trumpeting the "snarky" point of view of Television Without Pity, a smart website Bravo bought in 2007. The programming is also rife with schadenfreude. In addition to the oodles of "Housewives," there is a new show called "NYC Prep" about rich young snoots; another, "Miami Social," is about wealthy dramatic people getting comeuppance. ("It's a summer show and there's some surprising drama that happens on that show that is uncharted reality territory, yes, yes, yes," Cohen said.)
Cohen, enthusiast, greenlighter of all these things, does not see these shows this way: He does have a TV moral compass in there. In mid-June, he took to his blog to trash Heidi and Spencer Pratt, the "Hills" veterans and reality mannequins who are deep in play with the media, calling them "hateful" and "loser idiots."
"I love the idea of class and custom and social etiquette and all these things -- and I view it more sociologically," Cohen said of "Real Housewives." "I think it's a reflection of a certain slice of affluence in various parts of the country, and I think that it's funny and addictive and I think it's fun and I don't think it's harmful.
"To me it's sociology. To you it may be trash."
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