When the idea of the Real Housewives of New Orleans came up, the Watch What Happens Live host and Real Housewives executive producer Andy Cohen admitted that it was a fantastic proposal.
“You’re so right,” Cohen told Harry Connick Jr. when he pitched the idea on his new talk show, Harry. “We look for cities with strong personalities and is there a city with a stronger personality than New Orleans? No!”
“I’ll even be one,” Connick Jr. replied, offering to appear on the new franchise, should it come to be. “Behind the scenes, I’m a completely different person: no earpiece, heated toilet seat, the whole thing.”
In America, the franchise has expanded in nine cities: Orange County, New York City, Atlanta, New Jersey, D.C., Beverly Hills, Miami, Potomac and Dallas
Meanwhile the franchise continues to grow worldwide with over seven installments: Athens (Greece), Vancouver (Canada), Les Vraies Housewives (France), Melbourne (Australia), Cheshire (United Kingdom) and Auckland (New Zealand).
Earlier this month, Radar Online reported that Cohen revealed at Live Talks L.A. that The Real Housewives of Miami “didn’t work out,” just weeks after he raised the question in Superficial: More Adventures From The Andy Cohen Diaries.
“I knew the first question was going to be when is Real Housewives of Miami coming back and I said, ‘Never say never,'” he wrote in his book. “But I could see from the women’s faces that they didn’t believe me and then I kind of didn’t believe me, but I was getting nostalgic for them.”
Last month, Cohen dishes on the Real Housewives shows that could have been. “There are a lot of cities that we’ve cast in. People don’t know this,” Andy told Access Hollywood.
So where did Bravo look for potential Housewives? “We’ve cast in Greenwich, Connecticut, San Francisco, the wine country. We’ve cast all over the place. We have cast in Houston, where we didn’t wind up doing it, so there have been versions that never made it,” said Andy.
While there's no news of a new American city being added to the franchise, globally the franchise continues to grow as three international installments will be debuting in 2017 and 2018.
The Real Housewives of Sydney and The Real Housewives of Toronto will premiere early in 2017, and recently NBCUniversal confirmed that Thailand’s Kantana Group has commissioned the first Asian version of the franchise with The Real Housewives of Bangkok.
Photo Credit: Bravo