Not All Diamonds and Rosé: The Inside Story of The Real Housewives from the People Who Lived It

By Dave Quinn

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

“I like to think of Not All Diamonds and Rosé as the ultimate reunion. I know readers will be surprised, entertained, and even shocked at what’s in store." —Andy Cohen

Dave Quinn's Not All Diamonds and Rosé is the definitive oral history of the hit television franchise, from its unlikely start in the gated communities of Orange County to the pop culture behemoth it has become—spanning nine cities, hundreds of cast members, and millions of fans.

What is it really like to be a housewife? We all want to know, but only the women we love to watch and the people who make the show have the whole story. Well, listen in close, because they’re about to tell all.

Nearly all the wives, producers, and network executives, as well as Andy Cohen himself, are on the record, unfiltered and unvarnished about what it really takes to have a tagline. This is your VIP pass to the lives behind the glam squads, testimonials, and tabloid feuds.

Life’s not all diamonds and rosé, but the truth is so much better, isn’t it?

“This exhaustive oral history features dishy interviews with 185 cast and crew members behind the Bravo phenomenon. Fans will delight to read about how it all got started.”
—New York Post

Includes Color Photographs

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250765796

Dave Quinn

An entertainment journalist and lifelong Bravo fan since back in the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy days, Dave Quinn has covered the Housewives for outlets like PEOPLE Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. In addition to reviewing reality TV, much of Dave’s career has been spent writing about theater — which, when combined with the Housewives, makes him an expert in drama. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn with the only thing worth putting in his will: a ginormous TV.

Book preview

PART I

Meet the Wives

The Real Housewives of Orange County

PREMIERE DATE: MARCH 21, 2006

We were ready to kill the show before it ever made air.

—ANDY COHEN

Jeana Keough (Housewife): Vicki tries to pretend she was the first Housewife, but the bottom line is, it was me.

Vicki Gunvalson (Housewife): We started it together, but Jeana didn’t last fourteen years. It was my show. When you start a job and you’re the first employee and you work there for fourteen years, you have a sense of ownership. And I do believe if the show wasn’t successful the first couple of years, there would be no other franchises. There would be no fifteen seasons. I set the map.

Scott Dunlop (Original Producer, Real Housewives of Orange County, Season 1): Of course Jeana would say I created the show for her, just like Vicki would say It’s my show. But Jeana actually was the first person I met when I moved to Coto de Caza, California, in 1986. I was unpacking the trunk of my car, and this woman in a white jumpsuit came up to me and asked, What the fuck are you doing?

Before Coto, I was living in Los Angeles. And Coto is a beautiful place—five thousand homes, fifteen thousand people, it’s the largest gated community in America. But I was used to diversity, and it’s very WASPy. All-white conservatives in this uber-wealthy area.

Kathleen French (Senior Vice President of Current Production, Bravo): It is the weirdest place. You go through this first gate—you have to give your name—and you’re in this completely different land. Immediately, the world changes around you. It’s a huge community, and there are gated communities within the gated community. More fabulous homes behind other gates of their own.

Scott Dunlop: The men would leave for work and the women were left to run wild on the ranch, as they called it, playing golf and hanging out and shopping. These ladies who lunch, if you will. They were all such unusual humans. Entertaining, but also kind of annoying. There were the Tennis Bitches, who were these violent femmes resolving their unsettled conflicts from high school in tennis matches they’d play while dripping in diamonds. There was the Man of Leisure, who worked as little as possible to make as much money as possible. Oh, and the Boomerang Kid, who was living back at home again and slacking on the couch all day, watching MTV, because that’s way easier than finding a job.

All these archetypes started appearing for me, and I had an idea to do a short film that was kind of a send-up of life in affluent suburbia; something tongue-in-cheek and a little parodistic. Then, around 2003, reality TV was becoming big business. It made me think of the Loud family, who were on PBS’s An American Family. And I said to myself, "There are plenty of characters here who are just as compelling. Maybe this could be a reality series? What would that look like?"

After marinating on his vision, Scott wrote up a one-page treatment and, beginning in 2004, started crafting a sizzle reel he could use to sell his concept to networks. Luckily for him, he had a strong anchor at the center of his presentation: his neighbor, Jeana.

Jeana Keough: Scott said, You guys are like Ozzy Osbourne without the drugs.

Scott Dunlop: Jeana’s family was very unusual. They were perfect for television, really. Jeana came from Hollywood—she was a Playboy Playmate of the Year, she had been one of the muses in ZZ Top’s music videos, but she was now working as a real estate agent. Her husband, Matt Keough, was a retired baseball player. They were always gone, and their three children sort of roamed the streets of Coto de Caza wild. I remember seeing their son Shane one day, he must have been about seven years old, just standing at my door. I asked, Shane, what are you doing? He goes, I’m hungry. I said, Where’s your mom? and he didn’t have an answer. That was the Keoughs. I knew we could get a lot out of them.

Jeana Keough: He was pretty excited about us. I thought, Oh, how sweet. Anything we can do to help him out, we’ll do. I’ve always been a networker and someone who helps people realize their dreams. It’s coming from the Midwest, that’s what we do.

With the Keough family in place, Scott began scouting for other people around Coto to participate in his reel. When it came to the Tennis Bitches, he picked the leader of the pack: fitness fanatic, mother of two, and self-proclaimed trophy wife, Kimberly Bryant.

Scott Dunlop: Kimberly was one of the most eager to do the show. And she was fearless. The Tennis Bitches would always go out for cocktails and gossip, and while we were filming, Kimberly made this great backhanded comment about how her husband isn’t in as good shape as the others’ husbands because all he does is work. It captured my attention. She was also the one who was unafraid to say, Eighty-five percent of the women in Coto de Caza have breast implants. We used that down the line in the intro for the show and people hated her here for saying that.

Jeana Keough: I actually thought 85 percent was a low number. It was probably more!

After flushing out the sizzle with more participants—including future actor Ryan Eggold, of NBC’s New Amsterdam fame, as the show’s token Boomerang Kid—Scott began shopping it to networks under the title Behind the Gates. Bravo was the first to bite.

Frances Berwick (Chairman, Entertainment Networks, NBCUniversal): I was in the very first pitch meeting. Scott Dunlop came in wearing white leather loafers—which in New York stood out—and talked about this gated community that he lives in and the antics that were going on. He really created a picture where these lonely, bored Housewives were staring out the window as these barely legal pool boys cleaned their pools. And we thought, Well, that really sounds kind of up our alley. It was representative of the affluent, educated audience that Bravo attracts.

Shari Levine (Executive Vice President of Current Production, Bravo): You have to remember: Bravo had started out as an arts channel, so we were at a place where we were really defining ourselves and moving into uncharted reality programming.

Scott Dunlop: I was a first-time television producer, and this was a docu-soap as we know it now, which wasn’t as dominant at the time. But I knew that Bravo was kind of reengineering their brand.

Frances Berwick: The network was just coming on the other side of the huge hit that had been Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which changed everything for us.

Lauren Zalaznick (Former Executive Vice President, NBCUniversal): Myself, Andy Cohen, and our head of marketing, Jason Klarman, all came to Bravo in 2004 from the Universal acquisition. By that point, Bravo had already launched Queer Eye, and it was a success. But what I didn’t realize when I was put in charge of the network was that there was very little in the development pipeline that fit in with the Queer Eye ethos and, quite frankly, the Queer Eye audience. Nothing was working. With this vacuum in development, we sat as a team and really thought about our strategy, thought about our audience, and decided to make Queer Eye—our one hit—the blueprint.

Shari Levine: Lauren structured these development passion points to drive our programming decisions, and each of the Queer Eye guys represented those categories: Beauty, Fashion, Food, Design, and Pop Culture. We had just launched Fashion with Project Runway. We were in development on Top Chef, for Food, and knew we had something special there. Blow Out with Jonathan Antin hit Beauty, and Flipping Out, down the line, would be Design.

Lauren Zalaznick: Real Housewives was ostensibly going to be the Pop Culture launch show in our new mindset, with my tagline, which was Watch What Happens.

Jerry Leo (Former Executive Vice President of Program Strategy, Bravo): I was looking for something that felt very noisy. And Scott’s pitch, it felt like it could be Knots Landing for the new millennium. It had that CBS prime-time soap opera vibe; rich women living dramatic lives.

Scott Dunlop: When Bravo got it, they really showed a very honed interest. As a first-time television producer, and just from the business side, I said, There’s no way we want to walk away from that. They were engaged.

Rachel Smith (Executive Vice President, Development, Bravo): The sizzle certainly wasn’t perfect. It had a scripted feeling. Like, the producing style was quite different from what we would go for now. I’d compare it to maybe The Hills; that very kind of stilted, staged feeling to it. But we could see that there was something fantastic there.

Lauren Zalaznick: The reel needed focus. There was something like two hundred characters in there. There was the tennis pro, the head of security, the head of the housing association, the real estate guy, this one, that one, and the other one.

Andy Cohen (Executive Producer): It was early 2005 when I first saw Scott’s sizzle reel. I was in charge of production at Bravo at the time and Amy Introcaso-Davis, then head of development, handed me a VHS tape and a folder full of bios of women. She said to watch it, I’d love it, and it was coming my way. What that meant was: You and Shari (Levine) now have to go make this into a show. I watched and couldn’t believe how sexy and California everybody seemed, how big their boobs were, and the way they spoke to their kids. I’m not sure Shari and I totally knew what it was, but I knew if it worked it could be like a soap opera. I remember being very excited that they lived down the street and went to the same tennis club, like they did in Pine Valley.

Shari Levine: When considering shows that we were picking for Bravo, having those larger-than-life personalities or distinct points of view was really essential. Things had to feel different. We’d come to say it has to have The Bravo Wink, meaning it had a certain wink and a nod; a little bit of irony and fun. This had that.

Jeana Keough: We were breaking ground on a new form of TV.

Frances Berwick: None of us thought of it as a franchise at that time. We thought of it as really a social anthropological series—which in some respects, that is still what Housewives is—where we would follow these women, fly-on-the-wall, and see their lives.

Shari Levine: I don’t know that any of us thought it would blow up to be what it is now.

Andy Cohen: No WAY could I have ever imagined how this show would change my life. It was at this point a very odd VHS tape!

After buying the series, Bravo gave Scott his marching orders, including the need to find more female characters.

Lauren Zalaznick: We cast the show for months and months and months and months.

Scott Dunlop: The network ultimately wanted more moms, more housewives, so we started leaning into the aspect that all of the narrative would come from women.

Lauren Zalaznick: There’s really something to be said about the power of women living their lives on-screen. I wanted to celebrate that and celebrate women’s programming—which at the time was not revered, it was disparaged. It still is. It’s called this phrase that I really, really, really reject: guilty pleasure. Men can spend ten hours every Sunday watching the NFL, and that’s never called a guilty pleasure! That always bothered me.

Lifetime was also the No. 1 cable network for fifteen years, which shows you both how powerful women are in TV and also how desperate women are to see anything about themselves—even if it means being kidnapped, beat up, or killed off by cancer, which is all Lifetime seemed to do to women there. That’s why I wanted Bravo, and Housewives, to tell women’s stories in a completely different way. This wasn’t Lifetime, it was a different ethos. Our women had the power. They were CEOs of their lives, come hell or high water.

Scott Dunlop: There was a lot of interest from women who wanted to be a part of it. One woman from the sizzle reel was marrying her plastic surgeon, but she never made it on because the plastic surgeon wanted a boatload of money. There was a divorced single mom who surfed every day—she was kind of a different beat than everyone else we had, but she passed. There was also this mother of twins and she was super religious. The network really liked her and I remember going to her home for a second time, third time, fourth time, until I finally said to her and her husband, What’s the real objection here? And she said, We’re concerned because if there’s a lot of focus on this show, our children could be kidnapped. A helicopter could come in and kidnap them. I couldn’t get her past that.

To help expand his search, Scott put out two ads in the Coto de Caza community newspaper looking for subjects. A local kid named Michael Wolfsmith answered one of those ads, writing an essay about his family and his helicopter mom, insurance saleswoman Vicki Gunvalson.

Vicki Gunvalson: Michael wrote in, expecting he and his friends to do the show. And in his letter, he talked about coming back home in between semesters of college to train with me to become a successful insurance agent. And Scott Dunlop contacted me saying, We want to talk to you! Most women in this area don’t work!

Jeana Keough: Scott was shocked to find another woman who worked because there weren’t many of us around.

Scott Dunlop: I was fascinated with Vicki when I first met her. She was frenetic. She was a workaholic. She was mercurial. She was not afraid. I just knew she was right for this. But she was hesitant, especially after I interviewed her and got her on tape. I remember, we were sitting in her living room with her then husband, Donn Gunvalson, it was the last time that I was going to try to get her to agree, and she blurts out, Why would I be on television? I’m not pretty. I don’t know anything about television and I don’t understand what’s going on. I said, Vicki, maybe none of us know what we’re doing, but I find you eminently interesting, and people will relate to that. Just be yourself. And so she agreed.

Vicki Gunvalson: Donn had said, There’s no way we’re going to do a reality show. Everybody who does those ends up getting divorced. I said, We’re not gonna get divorced. That was the start of the crazy train, right?

Jeana Keough: I hadn’t met Vicki until the show started, even though she practically lived next door.

Vicki Gunvalson: Jeana lives two houses down, but we live in a very spread-out community; there’s about two acres between each of us, so we never crossed paths. Our kids knew each other, and she and I hit it off right away. It really was a nice friendship.

Jeana Keough: We really clicked. She was just fun. She’s from Chicago, so we had a lot in common as Midwestern girls.

While interviewing Vicki at her home office, Scott saw someone else who caught his eye: Vicki’s then employee, Lauri Waring.

Vicki Gunvalson: I met Lauri at this girl’s house in Dove Canyon, where we were playing Bunco one night. I didn’t like the other women, they were very pretentious and not women I wanted to hang around, but Lauri was going through a divorce and was complaining to me she didn’t know how she was going to bring money in. So I said, I train insurance agents from my house. I’ll teach you.

Scott Dunlop: Lauri worked with Vicki, so we got a twofer there. She was going through a bitter divorce and was trying to move on with her life. And part of that next chapter included wanting to learn the insurance industry in an authentic way, which Vicki embraced because she loved women who work. It was a rebuilding time for Lauri, which we felt was a great story to tell.

Andy Cohen: I was particularly smitten with Lauri—she was that soap archetype of being from the wrong side of the tracks, striving for more. This is very un-PC to say but I also couldn’t get over how big her boobs were. I just couldn’t imagine she and Vicki selling insurance with these big boobs—I’d never considered that this could be a thing!

Jerry Leo: I was particularly fixated on Lauri. I’m a daytime soap opera fan, and I know Andy Cohen is as well, and she looked like someone you would see on The Young and the Restless or The Bold and the Beautiful. I just wanted to see her life.

Scott’s cast was nearly complete, but he still needed a fifth woman to round out the group. Then he met twenty-four-year-old Jo De La Rosa.

Scott Dunlop: I was emceeing a fundraiser, and knowing we were in the final stages before going into production, I told my wife, Keep your eye open for anyone who might be good for the show. Not long after that, Slade [Smiley] walked in. He lived up the street, but I didn’t know him, and I immediately noticed the beautiful woman by his side.

Jo De La Rosa (Housewife): I was just a girl from Peru. I was never trying to pursue acting or TV or any of that. I wanted to go to law school!

Scott Dunlop: Jo was by far the most difficult to cast, but Slade really wanted it. Slade wanted in like dynamite. He smelled it and he wanted his fifteen minutes wherever he could get it.

Jo De La Rosa: Slade was definitely more interested. He was signed by an agent, because he had competed professionally as a cyclist for over ten years, and he had been an actor. We were dating for just under a year. And I was like, so not of that world. So I did it for him. I did it for love. I thought, This will be an experience we can do together as a couple.

Scott Dunlop: By the way, Slade remembers this whole thing differently. He’ll say, I paid $2,500 to get on the show. That wasn’t the case. There was a raffle and I had just mentioned onstage, while trying to get donations, that I was doing a television program and may be in the background of the show. I didn’t ask for Slade’s money, but he came up to me saying he wanted to be on the show. And I said, "I’ll talk with your girlfriend about being on the show.…"

Jeana Keough: I remember it differently, too. I actually met Jo and Slade at that party and I was the one who pitched them to Scott. I thought they were so cool!

Scott Dunlop: Jo ended up being an extremely interesting cast member who provided a riveting dynamic because she opened up the whole definition of Housewife, which ended up becoming a genius aspect in the brand.

With his cast nearly in order, production was finally able to begin on the series. There was just one more thing they had to address: the show’s name.

Frances Berwick: We felt like Behind the Gates didn’t really say what the show was, so we knew the name needed to change.

Rachel Smith: That title seemed like a more serious, tough documentary.

Jeana Keough: Our contracts all said Behind the Gates, which made me laugh hysterically because to get into Coto, you don’t cross through a gate. It’s like, a yellow Styrofoam noodle! I said, "We should call it Behind the Noodle!"

Scott Dunlop: Changing the title was a collaborative decision. There were a few names going around and I recall a discussion where the idea of The Real Housewives came up—because Desperate Housewives was such a hit on ABC.

Shari Levine: It wasn’t just Desperate Housewives, because The OC was also a really big show at the time. Someone internally at Bravo suggested we combine those two thoughts.

Rachel Smith: It was Lauren Zalaznick who said we call it The Real Housewives of the OC. She came up with the title in an email.

Lauren Zalaznick: Network TV was still really important at the time, and Desperate Housewives and The OC were both very, very, very popular. Both shows were really sharp and campy; they appealed to at least two generations and sort of painted themselves as portraits of how people live their lives in extremes.

Frances Berwick: I liked it because it was sort of a nod and a wink to those two scripted series. It felt sexy and glamorous.

Lauren Zalaznick: What was lost on everybody was the irony of the title. Because yes, it was a play on Desperate Housewives and The OC. But more than being on the nose, it was thumbing its nose; it was rejecting that they were either real or housewives. Bravo was a channel about people’s professional lives and our characters worked hard every day. They earned their own money, raised their kids, took care of their homes. On our network we were already elevating the status of being a style guru or a hairdresser or a chef or a fashion designer. And so here, too, the status of being a housewife.

Andy Cohen: I need to go on record that when Lauren added "… of the OC" to the title, which she said protected us in case we ever decided to do it in another city, Shari and I were vehemently opposed—worried the longer title was too clunky, and convinced we would never ever ever do this in another city. How wrong we were.

Filming began in 2005, but when Bravo saw the footage coming in, they began to question Scott’s approach.

Scott Dunlop: I had always hoped that it would be more like Curb Your Enthusiasm; more of a hybrid show. Based on reality, but maybe some of that reality would be amplified in a weird way. But Bravo, they did not want that at all.

Frances Berwick: That was not at all what we were looking for, so every time he would give us something that felt like it was sort of pre-produced, we’d push back.

Andy Cohen: Shari and I were going nuts because the rough cuts sucked. The confessional interviews where the ladies spoke straight to camera weren’t stylized—they weren’t well lit, and the women didn’t look their best. The women also weren’t going deeply into their emotions or being honest about what was happening with their friends. And the stories didn’t always make sense. What they were saying wasn’t matching the way we saw them acting. The more we at Bravo asked the producers in California for answers to fill in the blanks, the less anyone knew.

Lauren Zalaznick: We would have weekly production meetings, editorial meetings, etc., and I kept seeing Real Housewives in the same place on the status report. This went on for months. I kept asking, How’s it going? When am I going to see a cut? And one day Andy, Shari, and Frances came into my office and told me, We don’t have a show. I said, What? It’s been months! And they said, We don’t have a show. It’s not making any sense. The footage is just like, hundreds of hours of professional home videotape. There’s no story, there’s no arc. It’s not compelling. It’s not going to work.

Andy Cohen: Shari and I wanted it to go away. We were ready to kill the show.

Lauren Zalaznick: I stressed to them, We need this. We don’t have anything else. Because Queer Eye was dying. It had hit big and then fizzled quickly, never gaining numbers season after season. The future of Bravo was very much hanging on Housewives.

Frances Berwick: The question became, Should we spend the money to fix the show or do we just write it off?

Lauren Zalaznick: Frances is a very buttoned-up executive, very smart and levelheaded. She said, We can call it a wash or we can go back into the field and shoot for a few more weeks with all our characters, because we don’t know what’s going to work and who’s going to do what but we simply don’t have enough story now. And I believe the amount to go back and shoot was something like $140,000. That’s nothing for production, but it was such a big decision.

Frances Berwick: In the end, by shooting longer, we were able to get the footage we needed for that first season. To think, if Lauren said no, it nearly never would have happened.

Andy Cohen: Thank Lauren, and the Lord, that we didn’t kill it! It would’ve been at that point a four-hundred-thousand-dollar loss to kill it. I would put in my own money today to make sure that never happened, and it would’ve been the best investment of my life.

To help achieve their vision, Bravo took more control over production and hired Dave Rupel as showrunner. With writing credits on shows like General Hospital and Guiding Light, as well as production credits including The Real World and Temptation Island, Dave’s background in scripted soap operas and reality TV made him a perfect fit for Real Housewives.

Dave Rupel (Executive Producer): I was brought in on the third day of shooting. And it’s funny because Shari really, really pursued me for this job as if we had worked together before, which we never had. And that’s because, back in 2005, it wasn’t common for reality people to also have a scripted background. You had to have those storytelling skills.

Lauren Zalaznick: We didn’t have a story editor. Someone had to help give it purpose and structure.

Dave Rupel: We would sit down with each woman and ask, What’s going on in your life? What’s going on with your job? Your kids? Your husband? What’s going on with your charities? And then you start to build the schedule and follow the reality. It was a lot of the same process they still use now.

But Dave didn’t have relationships with the women like Scott did, and the original cast members resisted letting him in.

Dave Rupel: Vicki was notorious for not wanting to shoot. The show was not a known success at the time, so every time I saw Vicki, it would start off with a preamble—a five-minute complaint—about how every time we shoot with her we’re costing her money. And every time I saw her, the amount of money she was losing just by being on the show went up.

Scott Dunlop: We had some bumps with Jeana, too.

Dave Rupel: It was hard for Jeana to adjust to the reality of just being herself. She had been known for her beauty, and here she was, struggling with her weight. And her relationship with her husband, Matt, wasn’t in the best place. So it was tough for Jeana to put her life on display. She was like, People are going to see my husband doesn’t treat me that well and that my kids are a little bratty.

Scott Dunlop: Jeana wanted to control the show.

Jeana Keough: If you asked production, I thought I was the frickin’ director! They always used to say, Jeana’s an actress, she’s done this her whole life, of course she’s going to try to come across better on TV. She knows. And there was some truth to that.

Dave Rupel: The hardest one for sure was Kimberly. While we were filming, Kimberly had a skin cancer scare and she totally shut production out. She would not allow herself to be on camera until she got the diagnosis, which turned out to be negative. But because of that, we lost all of that great drama, that human drama. I always tell anyone when I’m casting a reality show, You may like me now but at a certain point, something is going to happen that makes you sad or angry or frustrated or upset and you’re going to look at me and say, ‘Dave, put the cameras down’ and I’m telling you now, I’m not going to put the cameras down because it’s those unexpected moments that the audience really craves and loves to watch.

I was disappointed that Kimberly wouldn’t let us be in the process, but we needed to tell that story and that involved her talking about her fears and all of that. I knew Kimberly was resistant to me, so I turned to Brenda Coston—one of our nicest field producers—to do the interview, and told Brenda, Kimberly has already told me she’s not going to cry and that all she wants to say is, ‘I am woman, hear me roar, and I am going to beat this.’ Let her talk about that as long as she wants and get it out of her system and when she’s done, you ask her the following questions: ‘If it had gone the other way and you had cancer, which was potentially fatal, what would you miss about your husband? What would you miss about your thirteen-year-old daughter, Bianca? What would you miss about your seven-year-old son, Travis? Brenda asked her those questions and Kimberly started crying for a solid hour. We got an amazing, emotional interview.

Vicki, Jeana, and Kimberly ultimately brought the stories Bravo was looking for. But doubts quickly surfaced from the network as to whether Lauri and Jo were the right fit.

Dave Rupel: Bravo was unsure if Lauri should be in the cast because she was divorced and single—oh, how times changed! But I lobbied hard for her.

Shari Levine: This was a show about people who lived in the gated community, and Lauri was someone who had lived that life, but lost it after she went through a divorce. It ended up being interesting to watch her come full circle because you got to see a privileged life from both sides.

Dave Rupel: There were some questions right away about Jo and Slade, too. The network was really attached to them as the kept younger woman and older rich man. But they tried a test scene and Shari worried they were too hammy.

Jo De La Rosa: Slade and I, we had seen the sizzle reel, and the way Scott shot that, it was a little bit more over the top and there was more of a comedic element to it. So we were really playing that up, but there were some moments I definitely wish did not happen on camera. Like, in the pilot, we were filming and I had too many glasses of wine and put on a hot pink boa and a zebra hat. And I climbed on top of Slade and took my top off, facing the wall so the camera only saw my back. That was definitely one moment I should not have done. I don’t have a lot of regrets but taking your top off and straddling your fiancé? Probably not the thing you want to show all of America.

Dave Rupel: With any of these Housewives, there’s always a first-season learning curve. Jo and Slade were really likable, and I thought we needed their story for the show—especially because Jo was Latina, which I knew was a well-needed bit of diversity among the group. Slade was also the most handsome husband among the group, and coming from soap operas, you always need a sexy leading man. So one of the first things I did was find a way to make them work.

Jo De La Rosa: There was one setup we did where I lost a bet doing this go-cart race with Slade and his prize was that I had to clean the house in a French maid outfit for the day. It was a million percent in good fun but also, I’m kind of horrified because cameras were there. And I swear, that costume will literally haunt me until the day I die.

Andy Cohen: I’ve never told anyone besides Shari this, but that first season I was not only very attracted to Slade, which won’t be surprising to anyone, but also Jo was giving me some kind of feelings. She might be the only Housewife I’ve ever been physically attracted to. The two of them were giving me feelings! But I digress.

Jo De La Rosa: I was so, so nervous, the first time I met the rest of the women. It was actually the first scene I ever shot! I felt like I was coming into their world. I was so young. I barely knew what the heck I was doing. I really looked to them to kind of shape and mold me into this housewife that Slade wanted.

Jeana Keough: Jo was someone I felt very immediately protective over. We clicked, and I really liked Slade. Jo still calls me Mama Jeans, and the nickname stuck with all the women. I hate it. I’d tell Jo, I’m not your mama, shut up! I’m older than your mama! But the girls always mean it in a nice way, ’cause they know I know how to do everything.

Jo De La Rosa: I loved all the ladies. Vicki ran shit—ran her home, ran her business, ran the conversation. It was super impressive. And she was super outgoing with her Woo-hoos all the time. Lauri was cool because she was very social; she’d go to these parties and events in L.A. and I was really drawn to that world, so we bonded. And Kimberly would always give me advice behind the scenes on how to be a good homemaker, how to be a good girlfriend, things I could do for my man. And oh my God, she had such a hot body! Her body was incredible. You know, she had that Pilates sculpted physique. I said, I would like to look like that one day, when I become an adult.

Jeana Keough: I was the glue that held everyone together. And we as a group started to get comfortable filming. It was practice makes perfect.

Dave Rupel: Late in that first season, Jo and Slade broke up. Again, it was Brenda in the field, and I remember her calling me being like, Oh my God, they’ve produced this whole scene, it’s so phony, it’s so artificial. And I said, Videotape is cheap. Keep rolling, keep rolling. And sure enough, Jo was drinking—she had a huge cocktail—and suddenly, their breakup became very real because Slade couldn’t resist taking potshots at Jo and she started to get mad. It turned out to be a really emotional scene and that became the key with Slade and Jo for my field directors. Just let them do their shtick and then keep going. It will get real.

Jo De La Rosa: That breakup was hard. I guess down deep, I wasn’t really looking to be a mom at twenty-five. I didn’t intentionally lead him astray, but I was really immature and very selfish, for sure. It sucked having to go through that in front of the camera. Fighting, splitting, packing, moving out—when you’re ugly crying, you don’t want cameras in your face. But I was always who I was, on or off the show. I just think it was difficult for me to process everything with the cameras there. You have a million emotions you can’t control. I couldn’t process it quickly enough.

Once filming on RHOC’s first season wrapped, Shari and Dave worked in post-production, putting in place many of the tentpoles of Housewives that fans see today.

Andy Cohen: The material was better, but we still had a lot of problems in post. Some stuff seemed fake, and it was hard to tell some of the women apart.

Jerry Leo: I remember watching an earlier cut and saying to Frances, All these blondes—Kimberly, Vicki, Lauri—I can’t tell them apart! How do we find a way to make sure that viewers don’t get confused? That’s how those establishing cards came about, the ones that show the women before each scene. It really became a staple across the entire franchise.

Andy Cohen: Shari Levine to this day is still giving detailed notes on the banners that come up before scenes. They identify each woman and give someone ownership over every scene. She came up with that whole system.

Dave Rupel: That’s like taglines. They’ve grown over the years into this iconic thing, but I came up with the idea to use a signature line of dialogue to help define each woman in the opening credits. And that was inspired by Vicki getting Botox and saying, I don’t want to get old!

Scott Dunlop: Those taglines have become so integral to the very fabric of the show, it’s hard to imagine that they ever weren’t there.

Lauren Zalaznick: Believe me, every corporate offsite that I ran, one of our best icebreakers was always, What would your Housewife tagline be? It just became a question you could ask and everybody instantly knew what that meant. And when you’d hear the answer, it was great because you knew exactly who that person is. It sums someone up pretty quickly.

Andy Cohen: For the opening credits, we had the idea to use the oranges. The opening of Desperate Housewives had the stars holding apples. This being Orange County, we gave them oranges.

Lauren Zalaznick: I was always meticulous about our packaging. Even during the process of designing the logo for the show, I wanted to make sure this was definable when we did other cities. The orange became an easy visual cue, so that was included in the final title treatment for the logo. And when we were shooting the opening credits, we made sure to have them holding oranges—not only to tie it all together, but to give another nod to Desperate Housewives.

Then we sent the art out and we’re at the Television Critics Association right before we’re ready to go on air and someone from NBC general counsel says to Jason [Klarman], "By the way, you can’t use that image of the women holding the oranges. And you can’t even call it The Real Housewives. Because ABC/Disney is going to say it’s too close to Desperate Housewives."

Eventually, we had this huge meeting with the general counsel and I was adamant. I said, Listen, the Walt Disney Company does not own fruit! Obviously, a decision was made to move forward and there was absolutely no litigation or threat of litigation.

Actually, they were worried about of the OC, too, because they thought it was too close to The OC on Fox. That’s why we changed the name to The Real Housewives of Orange County.

Andy Cohen: When I saw the finished show open I thought the women were going to be pissed that we’d leaned into the most shocking aspects of their lives. I called Shari, who said they’d seen it and loved it! I knew if the wives loved it, we were off and running.

Bravo premiered The Real Housewives of Orange County on March 21, 2006.

Rachel Smith: None of us really expected that it was necessarily going to be a hit at the beginning.

Jeana Keough: Well, I did! I knew it would be big. Heck, I wanted ownership back then, but Scott wasn’t going for it.

Jerry Leo: We wanted to protect the show, so we put Blow Out, which had a strong audience at the time, as our lead-in.

Scott Dunlop: The show started out and the first two or three episodes were meh in terms of numbers.

Lauren Zalaznick: You really have to understand how fragile that first season was. The way we made it strong was, we marathoned it to the max—the same playbook Jerry and I did at VH1 and the same playbook we did for Runway when it initially flopped. It picked up in the ratings as it went along. That’s how we built the audience.

Scott Dunlop: By the end of the first season, the show had an audience. And it was basically a perfect storm. Right time. Right place. Right show. Right network.

Shari Levine: As I watched the end of the final episode, the iconic and very beautiful and bittersweet music (which now ends all the OC finales) started playing. I was flooded with the thought of how we didn’t know anything when we started to make this series. There was no road map. It had never been done before. I looked at these beautiful women in the setting sun, and I thought of all the women, myself, and the viewers, and I was overcome with emotion. Something had happened here. I didn’t really understand then how much had happened, but I knew it was important.

Andy Cohen: I wasn’t expecting the show to win acclaim from the critics—and by the way, the reviews were mixed at best. I remember Tom Shales kind of getting that it was a sociological time capsule of a certain group of nouveau riche women, dressed a certain way (in what were called Sky tops), focusing on plastic surgery and their kids. When my friends started calling, I perked up. I’ll never forget my friend Graciela Meltzer calling me after the first episode and going, Who is this Vicki Gunvalson? Did you make her up? I’m obsessed. And Lauri? She’s the Farrah. Doesn’t Jeana look like Wynonna Judd? Her son is so hot!

Jeana Keough: The first thing I realized, watching myself on TV when the show premiered, was that I needed to lose some freaking weight. I gained weight the first season, and throughout some of my time on the show. The other girls figured out before me that you cannot eat on camera. Those dinners that were planned for us? You just cannot eat. But I would be sitting there going, Lauri, that looks so good, can I try that? I would try a little of everybody’s food, because we’d be at these fabulous restaurants and they’d order these really cool things. And I just blew up like a balloon. That’s something I really struggled with, because I was always so thin! My top weight used to be 130 pounds, even after Colton. But it was menopause; it happens to all of us. It just happened to me first. And the viewers, they were all so mean to me.

Scott Dunlop: At the end of the first season, the ladies came over to my house and there was this feeling in the air of Holy crap, we just did something that we never thought we could do. Every single one of them was in a really good mood. And it was there that the girls started to realize, Wow, we’re like a brand. This is bigger than us.

Jo De La Rosa: Never in our wildest dreams did the five of us, and definitely not little me, think that we were about to step into this world that would forever change our lives. The experience really connected us together forever. It doesn’t matter how many years go by; nobody will be able to understand the life-changing experience that was being on that first season of RHOC except Jeana, Vicki, Kimberly, Lauri, and me.

Dave Rupel: As everything was wrapping up, Shari asked me, What do you think? Should we do a season 2 with everyone? And I said, "No, that would be a horrible idea. I would follow the Real World format and go to a different city because once you’ve shot with the cast, and they understand the system, it’s not going to work." Of course, I was very wrong about that.

Lauren Zalaznick: That was an ongoing discussion. Should we recast entirely? Should we go back to that tape of two hundred characters we had and pick some more people? Because surely if you were real people doing real things, why would you ever be interested in living your lives out on camera for a second season?

Andy Cohen: This wasn’t a question for me. If this was truly going to be a soap opera, we had to keep going with this group. I wanted to see what would happen next with these women. It sounds crass to say, but when I found out from production that Jeana was splitting up with her husband, the show felt like a hit to me because I had real feelings about it. I cared. That’s what soaps do. I thought, Wow, we could do this forever.

Conversations about a second season started at Bravo quickly. But a second installment of RHOC would come with one big change behind the camera.

Dave Rupel: Bravo offered me a chance to return and show-run RHOC’s second season. The day I got the call, I was lucky enough to get two other job offers on the same day. I was offered a job working in political advertising in Sacramento, though it was for a conservative-leaning firm, which I wasn’t interested in. And I was offered a job to write for Guiding Light, this time as the associate head writer. I decided to go back to Guiding Light and worked there for the next three years until it got canceled.

Kathleen French: I was working at Evolution [Media] at the time, and we had a relationship with Bravo. We had done a special called Gay Weddings and a reality series called Boy Meets Boy way back in the day. And we also knew Dave Rupel, from his days working on a show called Bug Juice, a Disney Channel reality series we produced back in 1998 that focused around kids at summer camp. So when Dave decided not to return for RHOC’s second season, he recommended us to Shari Levine, and we got the phone call.

There was also a change in front of the camera: Kimberly Bryant decided not to return to the show for a second season.

Shari Levine: Kimberly ended up moving to Chicago at the end of the season, so we went in knowing she wasn’t going to be around.

Scott Dunlop: She didn’t even appear in the reunion.

Douglas Ross (Founder and President, Evolution Media): I don’t think that Kimberly liked being famous. When she signed up for the show, nobody knew what it was going to be, and now that she saw it, it just wasn’t her cup of tea. Over the years, she came back a few times for finale parties and we filmed when some of the girls went to Chicago. But she started pulling back. Subsequent times when we’ve tried to reach out to her to participate in things like the 100th episode special or something like that, she just said she was not interested.

In Kimberly’s place, Tammy Knickerbocker was cast. A friend of Jeana’s, the down-to-earth divorcée and mother of three had a personal life rife with drama. Not only was she trying to rebuild her financial life after her ex-husband Lou Knickerbocker’s business went under, she was also raising two opinionated teenage daughters while her ex-boyfriend, Duff Evans—the father of her four-year-old son—was trying to reconcile with her after their split.

Tammy Knickerbocker (Housewife): Jeana and I had known each other for fifteen, sixteen years. Our girls had grown up together and we were buddies, we hung out all the time. Coto was a pretty lonely place back in the day; you held on to friends like that. Scott Dunlop used to work with my ex-husband, Lou, and Duff was working with Vick and Lauri, so I knew them, too. Coto is a big place but a small place.

Jeana Keough: She also had a connection to the show already. You know the gate in the opening credits? That was hers! We needed a gate for the show back in season 1 and I said, Scott, let’s use Tammy’s gate. Because it was really big and