Bethenny Frankel Believed Bravo Wanted to Steal the Show She Pitched– so She Backed out
Bethenny Frankel pitched a show to Bravo and Andy Cohen, but definitely didn’t want it to be anything like The Real Housewives of New York City.
Frankel shot back at reports that she had recently pitched a show to the network, but the network turned her down. She’s currently leading the charge to demand improved working conditions and contracts for reality stars.
But she shared on her podcast, Just B with Bethenny Frankel, that the show she pitched was two years ago and that she was the one who backed out of the deal.
Bethenny Frankel worked on a show 2 years ago
“Over about two years ago I was in Nantucket and I pitched a project to a production company called Pop. Matt Anderson, he produced Miami, Real Housewives of Atlanta, and Married to Medicine,” she said. “And I pitched him on Bethenny, the Next Chapter being in Connecticut, and the people around me.”
“I had spoken to Andy Cohen and pitched it to him. He loved it. We did a beach walk. He loved it. And Bravo was interested in it. And Bravo basically said to Matt and Pop, go flesh this out, go development,” Frankel continued.
“So they started sending me women to be around me. And only 100 times I say to them, I don’t want this to be a Housewives. They don’t like that culture. This has to be anything but Housewives. I don’t want to be Housewives. They kept saying to me, It will not be Housewives.”
“But lo and behold, they were casting all these different women. We kept fleshing it out. I was producing it. It was my concept. It also involves this podcast, narrating it. And it was this whole concept that started between 18 months, two years ago,” she added.
Why did Bethenny worry about her show?
“We were about to be at the signing point like April and May, and I had been punting so much so that the production company kept saying I’d been punting. And my lawyers didn’t like the production company’s practices because they had been casting people and developing the show and they wouldn’t give us the materials that they would be casting.”
“And it was my concept that I pitched them about a group of people in Connecticut,” she shared. “Who was I surrounding myself with in my next chapter in Connecticut. The types of women they were casting made me worry that I was getting a little Housewives and they produced a lot of Housewives.”
“I started getting cagey and didn’t want to do it. Someone reached out to me from the Bravosphere and said to me that the production company Pop and Matt Anderson, my partners had produced Married to Medicine and that they had allegedly stolen the show, Married to Medicine from a cast member.”
“I don’t know the story, but they stole the show, allegedly, and things that had been going on in the interaction and in the deal negotiating between myself and this production company were making me feel worried that they were going to try to do this Connecticut ensemble show without me, which was a concept that I pitched to Andy, that I pitched to them.”
Bethenny Frankel said she didn’t ‘want to do it’
“They were going to try to get cute and figure out another way to do it and call it something different,” she said. “But still do it in Connecticut because they had spent time and money fleshing it out. And I didn’t like the way it felt and it really was like bullseye.”
“I felt like they were going to steal the show. And this other person said to me, ‘Well, they stole that Married to Medicine.’ And then I found out that it resulted in a massive lawsuit and a settlement. So I called my lawyer at Grubman and said, I don’t want to do it, called the club on the show. I just don’t want to do it. So that was in like April or May.”
