Andy Cohen finally got his wish! The Bravo executive producer recently revealed to Us Weekly that Bethenny Frankel’s return to The Real Housewives of New York was a long time coming.
“She’s one of the most popular housewives we’ve ever had on any of the shows. This is something I was working on since June,” Cohen told Us at the GQ Gentlemen’s Ball in NYC on Wednesday, Oct. 22. “I think the timing was really right.” he added. “I think one of the reasons she’s so good as a Housewife is she’s really an oxymoron. She’s super tough but she’s super vulnerable.”
Bravo confirmed this week that Frankel would be returning as a full-time Housewife in the show’s upcoming seventh season. (Us broke the news earlier this month.) Frankel told Us she liked the idea of a fresh start, and according to Cohen, her past struggles have something to do with that.
“She said to me, ‘You know, I’m coming off this really high profile failure of my talk show, my marriage fell apart.’ So she is really starting over,” Cohen told Us at the GQ Ball. “It’s kind of an amazing unique moment for her to rejoin the show. It really makes sense in a weird way. When I first started talking to her about it, it seemed kind of unbelievable. But the more we talked about it, it seemed totally right.”
Frankel’s return is a victory for Cohen, but the recent fate of another housewife delivered quite a blow. During the event, Cohen also commented on Teresa Giudice’s prison sentencing. It was announced Thursday that she will serve her 15-month sentence at the Danbury, Connecticut prison that the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black is based on.
“I’ve texted with her,” he told Us. Cohen kept mum on whether he was going to squeeze in another season of The Real Housewives of New Jersey before Giudice’s sentence begins in January, but did reveal if she will be getting her own holiday special. “No, none planned,” he told Us.
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