How Andy Cohen Gets It All Done

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If you read Pulling Weeds, chances are Andy Cohen needs no introduction. As an executive producer, he has made Bravo’s reality-TV shows into must-watch events that dominate pop culture. He hosts the network’s Watch What Happens Live! chat show five days a week from a small studio in Manhattan, where everyone from the messiest housewives to A-list actors sit down to talk shit with him. He writes books, does storytelling tours with Anderson Cooper, strolls on the beach in Amagansett with John Mayer, and has dinner in the West Village with Sarah Jessica Parker. He goes wook mode at Dead & Company shows all over the country.

He also curates “Radio Andy” on SiriusXM, where he brings together voices from all corners of pop culture to chat around the clock. Whether on satellite or cable TV, he is a master of casting; sometimes the choices are obvious home runs, while others are nuanced and play out over time. And he knows how to get people to talk, which might be the most valuable currency in our ever-increasing attention economy.

Cohen took some time out of his busy schedule to chat with me from New York City about his radio empire, finding the time, calendar options, reality television, and his beautiful head of hair.

GQ: You’ve been in the news lately regarding your SiriusXM contract renewal, but I’d like to discuss how you manage it all and how the station contributes to that. It requires a lot more effort than people might realize.

Andy Cohen: That is true. Building it in the first few years was very labor-intensive. It really took five or six years to not only get the channel where I wanted it to be, but to get my own show to a place that I wanted. It started twice a week for two hours, and we changed it to four days a week for an hour a day. But it was also about getting the schedule and the talent right. We backed into getting Jeff Lewis, which was transformative for the channel. I worked on getting the Smith Sisters for years before they committed. They’re an undiscovered gem. They’re superstars, and I believe so strongly in who they are and what they’re doing. I started the channel with Bevy Smith and Sandra Bernhard, and they’re still here. We’ve been able to fill it in with Tinx and Kelly Ripa, who are stars, and then we’ve got Dorinda and Kiki Monique on Reality Checked every day. It’s really a very cool landscape for one pop culture destination.

It feels like it’s really from your brain. When you name all the talent, it seems like these people have no relation to each other, but in a good way. I imagine you grew up with terrestrial radio, just as I did. That had that same feeling, where you would realize, “Wow, there’s a lot of different voices here.” It keeps it entertaining.

Dan Rather had a show on Radio Andy for the first five years. We had a show called “Alter Family Politics” with Jon Alter and his family debating politics for an hour.

Did that stuff work, or did it feel too far from everything else?

For me, it worked because politics is important to me. I think it was for many people. They just wanted pop culture from the channel. And I think that as people get more separated by two beliefs, left or right, the idea of having any kind of centrist conversation about politics seems impossible.

All of these things come into play every day. Whether it’s reality TV, music, politics, or sports, all of these things contribute to a well-rounded life. But I do think that people want it to be a little more siloed now, to save themselves.

Yes, exactly. And that’s fine. But it was a great launch point for the channel.

I do, and one of my passion projects has been programming my own music channel. We took over Radio Andy with music for Pride Weekend. And Scott Greenstein, who runs Sirius, saw how passionate I was about it and was like, “Do you want a music channel?” It’s called Andy’s Kiki Lounge on channel 302. If Radio Andy is an expression of my pop culture brain, then the Kiki Lounge is my ultimate mixtape.

I want to talk about time management. I feel like you’re old school and you have an insatiable appetite, which fuels the whole thing.

Yeah, my plate is so full that I wind up now saying no to almost everything. I don’t know what more I could take on.

When something comes to you now, what’s the decision-making process?

First, I have to be super passionate about it. I have to be like, “Oh my God, I really want to do this.” And if I really want to do it, I will find a way, and I’ll find the time. I feel like I know how to get things done.

Are you a Google Calendar whore?

I’m not on Google Calendar. I’m on Outlook.

Oh, wow, you’re a real corporate thug.

I am, because I still have an NBCU mailbox. But all of the parents are on Google, so it’s all of these fucking invites to kids’ birthday parties.

You need to integrate.

I do.

Let’s talk TV. You guys do a really great job of finding these cities before they explode. You find the right people and shine a light on them, and it seems to come naturally. What is that process like?

There’s a lot you don’t see. There’s so much that is ongoing, and there’s so much stuff that’s been in development for a long time. I mean, I can’t tell you the number of shows about the horse community…

Sure. Things that just bombed.

We’ve been through several castings [for] Real Housewives in a couple of prominent cities where people were always like, “Why don’t you do one there?” But we just never found the right group. We all have to be really sure. I remember when the casting for Potomac came in, it wasn’t going to be a Housewives show. When I saw it, I was like, “You guys, these are housewives!” They were like, “Could we launch a Housewives of Potomac?”

It doesn’t roll off the tongue.

It doesn’t. But I think Rhode Island is going to be a real blockbuster. We just wrapped season one.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that there are groups of women like that in every city. You tap in and decide which ones are worthy of the crown, but they exist everywhere.

They exist everywhere, but just because they exist everywhere doesn’t mean that they should be televised everywhere. Anderson Cooper and I spent four years on tour going around the country where we would tell stories, and the audience was full of potential housewives in every town we were in.

Whether it’s getting someone for your channel or for Bravo, the real skill is knowing if they have it or not. You can’t engineer that. It’s a gut thing that you’ve trained over the years. And it’s scary because that sort of shit is being taken away, and computers are making the decisions for us. In some realms, it’s more efficient, but specifically in entertainment, it can’t work the same way. Music, and I think television, especially require something intangible that not everyone can put their finger on.

I would hope not.

Before we go, let’s talk about your hair. There’s been a lot of chatter about this. Are we going to keep it going?

I want to keep it going. I started to grow it out at the beginning of the summer, but I just kept growing it, and people really responded to it. But I actually have a very full head of hair. Why wouldn’t I lean into that?