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:
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)