For the cover of New York’s annual TV issue, Jessica Pressler returns to the magazine for an intimate and revealing profile of legendary Housewives producer and Bravo talk show host Andy Cohen and how he has survived the “Reality Reckoning” (at least for now). Cohen built his career dancing up to the line of propriety and now finds himself in a reality TV moment of his own making, under suit by several former Housewives. He can’t help but continue to push the boundaries of good taste, even if he knows it may be threatening everything he’s built: “Sometimes at night I’ll be in bed and I’ll think, Huh, did I say something? I’m always waiting for the thing that’s going to make it all fall down.”
Pressler spent more than a decade as a writer at New York beginning in 2007, writing such memorable features as “The Hustlers at Scores” a finalist for a National Magazine Award and basis for the movie Hustlers, and “Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It,” the story of socialite grifter Anna Delvey that was the basis of the Netflix series Inventing Anna.
The cover was photographed by Martin Schoeller.
Also in the issue, Kathryn VanArendonk embeds in the set of Love is Blind’s seventh season and interviews creator Chris Coelen as he drops a new group of singles into his strange experiment – and wrestles with all the lawsuits against the series. Mark Harris writes on Survivor, and how the game used to be a contest of social, physical, and strategic skill, but is now turning into a show about nothing but itself; Jackson McHenry visits the set of the buzzy Gen-Z finance drama Industry, which may be poised to finally break out now that it has a new Sunday-night time slot and Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington co-starring; Lawrence Burney profiles The Bear’s Lionel Boyce; and Josef Adalian returns with the annual streamer ranking.
“We’ve been struck over the past year by how much reality TV has dominated the cultural conversation and so a lot of our stories reflect those obsessions, as well as the controversies surrounding them, from Love is Blind to Real Housewives’ Andy Cohen,” says culture editor Tomi Obaro. “Meanwhile, the summer will see the return of some the most beloved scripted shows on TV right now, which we’ve highlighted in the issue as well—from a profile of The Bear’s fan-favorite Lionel Boyce to a deep dive into the most unhinged finance drama more people should be watching—Industry.”