Bravo hit the jackpot when they enlisted Andy Cohen to host a little post-show for their Real Housewives line-up called Watch What Happens: Live. According to Vulture, this little chat show often beats out other late night shows — even The Daily Show — and pulls in 1.5 million viewers on average. It’s no wonder that AMC, the network that produces high-quality shows with only meager audiences, would want to get a slice of that pie. That’s right, AMC, where Story Matters, is looking into producing a show akin to Watch What Happens, only instead of chatting about who shouldn’t have pulled whose hair, hosts and guests will chat about Don Draper’s latest debacle or which zombie kill was the best moment of the latest Walking Dead episode.
Word has it that AMC secretly filmed a pilot of this Watch What Happens-style series with none other than the host of the Nerdist podcast and the moderator at The Walking Dead’s San Diego Comic Con panel, Chris Hardwick, as the pilot host. And if the series does get off the ground, it’s likely that it will start alongside the zombie series in October. Granted, that doesn’t mean that Hardwick will necessarily continue to host.
If AMC gets this to work, it could be the answer to their budgetary woes. They’ve recently made moves to cut the budgets for many of their series, including The Walking Dead and Mad Men (both of which saw disputes between the network and their creators), and adding some cheap, easy-to-produce content that’s tied to the programs viewers are tuning in for could quickly and easily increase thier sustained viewership. After all, there are only so many people who are enticed by the 11 p.m. viewings of The Naked Gun on a Sunday night that the network offers up now.
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Source: Vulture
