Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture, Andy Cohen [the best books to read txt] 📗

be huge, and so did we. Within reason. I spent one month juggling her high hopes for the performance with our limited capabilities to meet them. Mariah suggested posing for the cover of TV Guide with Bryant, but CBS nixed it because they wanted to promote Bryant and his coanchor. Mariah took this in stride but upped the ante by demanding that the circle next to Central Park on Fifty-ninth Street be closed to traffic. I was sure that CBS could make this happen with the City and the Parks Department. Surely Mariah’s concert was on a par with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? I kept telling Mariah’s people not to sweat it.

But I was sweating the hell out of it. I felt more pressure associated with this booking than any before—or since. Mariah needed to launch her new album in a major way and CBS needed Mariah to launch this new show in a major way. But in the meantime, something else launched. This is as humiliating for me as it is gross for you: It was my first and only case of hemorrhoids. My bottom broke out in a mess of ’roids so terrible that I could barely walk, and it was all brought on by the stress surrounding the concert. (“Sit on one of those DONUTS,” my mom implored in e-mails. “Take a SALT BATH!”) The closer the date came, the more pressure I was getting from Mariah’s camp to show them the street-closure paperwork and I didn’t have it. The gears of municipal bureaucracy had chewed up our request but hadn’t spit out any permits yet, and we were running out of time. We’d already announced the concert when Team Butterfly called to tell me they were pulling the segment, to appear instead on Today, if I didn’t deliver the nonexistent paperwork. Mariah did cancel, and every newspaper in the country covered the “story.” Even my beloved Oprah asked Mariah about canceling on CBS. Meanwhile, my ass was, literally and figuratively, in trouble.

On the morning of our launch, I stood in our control room watching the number one female recording artist of the nineties sing two songs on the Today show plaza, beneath a giant rainbow of balloons and surrounded by a sea of fans, as one lone clown from the Big Apple Circus did the saddest, most depressing “routine” on our plaza for probably the same fifteen people who’d made up our studio audience back when I’d worked on this show the first time. The show was a bomb, and even as my Mimi-induced hemorrhoids began to shrink, the chorus of no’s coming from every celebrity publicist on the planet grew to a cacophony.

I didn’t know what to do. For all of the setbacks I’d been through in this career, I had never considered the possibility that it could all just end. And then what would I do? Go back to St. Louis and Allen Foods to resume my bottle-capping career? Luck intervened at exactly the right moment at exactly the right time, when I received an offer to run the programming department for a start-up cable channel, TRIO, helmed by the legendary Barry Diller. Cable was an entirely different world than network television, and I had no idea what the future would hold if I left it all behind to work for a channel that didn’t even exist yet. On the other hand, I had a good idea what the future might hold if I stayed where I was. So, after spending ten years with a front row seat (albeit the least desirable one) to every major event of the nineties—Clinton’s nominating convention, the Kerrigan-Harding Olympics in Lillehammer, the first Vanity Fair Oscar party, every award show, and Dan Rather almost biting it in Don Imus’s airplane—my career at CBS News was over.

TRIO was to focus on popular culture and the arts with lots of original documentaries and live entertainment events, two things I loved. When I got there, I knew a good deal about how to produce programming but had no clue about marketing, promotion, ad sales, budgets, contracts, scheduling, distribution, and all the other intricacies that were part of the gig at a small newborn network. Crash course time!

I went from haggling with publicists to meetings with Barry Diller. Remembering the advice I’d been given as a CBS intern, I tried to listen more than I spoke, and only to speak about that which I was confident I knew. Which was often problematic, because a lot of what I was supposed to be speaking about was numbers, and my brain has a tendency to go blank when I see an Excel spreadsheet.

TRIO launched softly and quietly, with limited distribution and not a ton of original programming. After a couple of years, a new president was brought in to lead the network, and I began working directly for her. In Lauren Zalaznick, I found a mentor with an almost supernatural sense of creativity, who shared my love of pop culture and appreciation for weird and wonderful people. We organized our schedule into three or four tent-pole programming events, and the channel became best associated with one called Brilliant but Canceled, about shows that had been critically acclaimed but canceled before their time. We produced an original documentary and series about the subject and ran cult-favorite shows like Freaks and Geeks, EZ Streets, and Action. As part of “TRIO Uncensored” we produced a documentary called The N-Word (yes, that N-word) that went on to win a Peabody, which is an award that does not come with a red carpet but is very coveted among those who work in television.

Oh, and maybe best of all, Lauren shared my enthusiasm for Battle of the Network Stars, which we quickly acquired and reran in its entirety. If you happened to watch it, you will undoubtedly be amazed by Howard Cosell’s commentary, which ran from racist (“Tim Reid can’t swim because he’s black”) to sexist (“Just look at