Tag Archives: Bravo

Remember when Bravo was a true arts channel, airing off the radar independent films and providing viewers with hours upon hours of James Lipton interviews in which serious actors talked about their craft? If your answer is, “No,” that is likely because the Bravo of today bears little resemblance to its more high-brow ancestor, having clipped its artsy roots to grow instead into the CNN of reality programming: a place on the dial where a roster of a few central stories are repeated endlessly to justify the network’s role as a twenty-four hour cable channel. With CNN, of course, the stories are “news;” with Bravo, the stories are those of its reality TV “stars,” not the least of which are the women who populate the abbreviated seasons of the many incarnations of Bravo’s Real Housewives series. Continue reading →