Production
While in production for Season 1, the show was initially titled The Manhattan Moms. The first season premiered on March 4, 2008 and starred Bethenny Frankel, LuAnn de Lesseps, Alex McCord, Ramona Singer and Jill Zarin. Despite the series title, the women featured were not all housewives. Frankel and Singer owned their own businesses, McCord and Zarin had jobs outside their home, and Frankel was not even married when production began. Kelly Killoren Bensimon, who is divorced, was added to the cast for the second season, which premiered on February 17, 2009. Frankel's spinoff, Bethenny Getting Married?, premiered on June 10, 2010 and features appearances by Singer and McCord. On August 31, 2010, Frankel made an official announcement that she would not be returning to the Real Housewives of New York City series for its fourth season. In September 2010, the fourth season began filming with Cindy Barshop, who is a single mother, as the series' newest housewife. Bravo pushed the Season 4 premiere back until April 7, 2011 and instead premiered The Real Housewives of Miami on February 15, 2011.
Bravo announced in September 2011 that the show would be revamped for its fifth season and effectively fired half of its cast, letting go four of its seven housewives: Barshop, Bensimon, McCord, and Zarin. The fifth season premiered on June 4, 2012 with new cast members Aviva Drescher, Carole Radziwill, and Heather Thomson, leaving Singer and De Lesseps as the only original cast members from season one, along with Sonja Morgan, who joined the show in its third season.
Filming for the 6th season of the series started in January 2013, with housewives Ramona Singer, Luann De Lesseps, Sonja Morgan, and Aviva Drescher all confirmed to return. However, production halted in February, it has been confirmed that Bravo wanted to wait until Spring to start filming so they can film the ladies "in the Hamptons and in fashionable dresses, rather than bundled up in coats like last season". Production is expected to resume in April with a Fall 2013 premiere.
Read more about this topic: Jill Zarin
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)