The House That "Real Housewives" Built

Tomorrow night is the season finale of the Real Housewives of New York City, the Bravo reality show about five affluent Manhattan women working (well, sort of), shopping, and climbing the social ladder. An announcement on whether the show will be back next season will also come tomorrow.

A renewal seems likely given that the show -- and indeed the entire Real Housewives franchise -- has played a larger and larger role in Bravo's programming strategy, with hugely hyped season premiere episodes and back-to-back marathon specials.

When the Real Housewives of Orange County, the reality show inspired by the huge success of both Desperate Housewives on ABC and the O.C. on Fox, premiered on March 21, 2006, it pulled in an average of just 430,000 viewers across the country, according to Nielsen. The show depicted middle-aged, relatively affluent women, living in a gated community in California, coping with blended families, their relationships with one another, and the indignities of aging. By the premiere of the third season, in November, 2007, the show garnered a more substantial 1.2 million viewers. Bravo had a formula that worked.

The Real Housewives of New York City, a spinoff of the Orange County show, made its debut in early March to a sizable audience of 824,000. The show's viewership then grew 89 percent among adults 18-49 and 69 percent among total viewers versus the prior four-week time period.

The Manhattan women are less bland than their California counterparts, with more substantial work lives and bigger ambitions. Two episodes since the premiere have gotten over a million viewers each, and average viewers per episode has totaled 967,000 so far. Tomorrow's finale is expected to do even better.

"We couldn't be happier with the show. It's turned into this fantastic water cooler sensation, and frankly we're even obsessed ourselves," says Andy Cohen, senior vice president of programming and production at Bravo. Bravo officials declined to say whether the New York housewives would be picked up for a second season. That announcement is expected to come tomorrow, at Bravo's upfront press briefing.

Bravo itself is a high-profile piece of NBC Universal's struggling television business, where cable giants like USA outperformed the NBC network by a wide margin this year. Most recently, NBCU went to court to protect a Bravo ratings winner, Project Runway. It also tried to revitalize its tired network upfront format with a new approach, introducing a 65-week programming schedule and meeting one-on-one with advertisers, an approach that generally met with favorable reviews.

But NBC's television business needs all the help it can get. When General Electric announced last week that it had missed earnings--and that NBCU earnings would grow less than 5 percent for the year, below earlier forecasts--analysts speculated that the entertainment unit was an unnecessary distraction and could be chopped up, with the broadcast TV operations possibly sold off to a private-equity firm and the profitable cable networks and digital operations spun off.

It would be surprising, therefore, if Bravo discarded a show that reliably delivered audiences of 800,000 and up. But, with a recession on the way, maintaining their lavish lifestyles might grow harder for the five N.Y.C. wives (Jason Colodne, the boyfriend of one of the show's stars, has filed a $55 million suit against his former employer, a private equity firm, which had canned him after appearing on an episode of the show).

And finding a third locale for the Real Housewives franchise--where the women have the means to indulge in over-the-top consumption but are blase enough to share it with the world--might be even more difficult.

The Real Housewives of... Dubai?

Sophia Banay