Television, if you think about it, is really little more than a wilderness of yentas. The meddlers, the busybodies, the gossips—they are the engines that push plots forward and keep us entertained, week after week, for years. Lucy Ricardo is a yenta, and so are Ralph Kramden, Barney Fife, Miss Piggy, Theodore “The Beaver” Cleaver, and Dr. Who. Which, maybe, explains how Andy Cohen, a middle-aged network executive with no previous experience on camera, managed to break on through to the other side of the screen with his nightly talk show on Bravo TV, Watch What Happens: Live: Cohen is a marvelous yenta.
Trying to describe the show to those who have never seen it is a little bit like being 14 and trying to describe a slumber party to your parents the morning after. None of the hilarity survives, and the breakdown, delivered after the fact, makes the whole thing sound trivial. On the show, Cohen staged a wedding between the pets of two reality television stars. He played a beauty-queen-themed guessing game with Joey Lawrence and Steve Gutenberg. Why would anyone watch that?
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