Terrible if you’re living it, great if you’re watching it — that is one of the basic formulas for reality TV, a genre that has been wildly popular for years, if never exactly hip. Zalaznick’s innovation has been to take this form of mass entertainment and make it boutique and chic, aiming for a small but young and affluent audience, the kind that advertisers covet.  Since she arrived at Bravo four years ago, Zalaznick has been polishing the genre of reality TV to a high sheen, taking its contestants off primitive islands and placing them squarely in sophisticated corners of cities like New York and Los Angeles. Instead of eating insects, navigating obstacle courses or flaunting their physical charms to woo lonely rich guys, the contestants on Bravo compete, with just as much zeal, to show their good taste and talent in high-status fields like food, fashion and design.  The formula may be lowbrow — attractive people pitted against one another, ruthless eliminations — but the content is, if not exactly highbrow, then certainly high-style. It’s voyeurism for the voyeur with a good eye.  Not all of Bravo’s original programming revolves around competition, but the shows all start with reality, at least the reality of competitive, urban, coastal professionals — the gymgoers, the restaurant patrons, the trendy shoppers, the interior decorators. An entire subset of Bravo programming has been devoted to the world of high-end hair salons: “Blow Out” followed the hairstylist Jonathan Antin as he strove to expand his merchandising empire; “Shear Genius” engages hairstylists in heated competition; “Tabatha’s Salon Takeover” features tough-love makeovers for mismanaged businesses.  Long known as the network that brought you “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” Bravo is probably best known these days for “Project Runway,” the popular fashion-design competition. The show’s producer, the Weinstein Company, is trying to move it to the Lifetime network, but NBC recently won a preliminary injunction barring Lifetime from marketing, promoting or running the show. Regardless of the show’s future, Zalaznick has been building a repertory of programming to satisfy her viewers’ fashion lust. “The Rachel Zoe Project” tags along with the celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe as she manages her team or shops for the right belt to capture her slouchy, carefully haphazard aesthetic. And madcap shopping sprees are a recurring feature on Bravo’s “Real Housewives” series — which chronicles the competing, parenting, consorting and, most of all, clothes-consuming of very wealthy women in Atlanta, New York City and Orange County.  Bravo’s shows have a knack for flattering the viewers’ sense of their own good taste, whether the viewers are judging fashion designs on the runway or scrutinizing the women on the “Housewives” series for fashion faux pas (entire plot lines turn on the sins of overdressing). To watch Bravo is to feel like an insider — to be taken inside a gated community or the back office of the exclusive gym (as in “Work Out,” a documentary-style soap about the athlete and entrepreneur Jackie Warner). To watch Bravo is also to be let in on the joke: “Lauren has really cultivated that special brand of reality television that is winking at you, that’s letting you feel good about watching a guilty pleasure,” says Randy Barbato, an executive producer of “Million Dollar Listing,” a Bravo reality show that follows young brokers in Los Angeles as they try to sell expensive homes.  A certain kind of advertiser, naturally, likes shows about high-end taste and consumption. Zalaznick’s real feat has been making sure that high-end viewers like the shows, too. Among women ages 18 to 49, Bravo is the fastest growing of the top 20 entertainment cable networks, and its viewers are the most educated and upscale (about a quarter of them make more than $100,000 a year), a demographic that advertisers are desperate to try to reach. Berwick, the general manager, came up with a catchy name for this premium demographic: the affluencers. The network even created for advertisers a one-off magazine called Bravo Affluencer, which depicted on its cover two quintessential affluent influencers: an attractive man and woman, both in their late 20s, shopping bags and P.D.A.’s in hand, passports visible in pockets, dressed casually but stylishly, looking savvy, plugged in, on top of it. The two could easily be the sitcom characters Will and Grace; in fact, Bravo executives actually use the phrase “Will and Grace” to describe a subset of their viewers: urban gay men and single female professionals, two categories of viewers particularly drawn to shows like “Project Runway” and “Top Chef.”  Without working too hard, you can also see the young woman on the magazine cover as a different Bravo audience archetype: a “P.T.A. trendsetter,” the young mom who lives in a suburb like Winnetka, Ill., but who still wants to eat at the new hot restaurant in the city and shows up at preschool pickup with a Marc Jacobs bag. The young man could be what Bravo calls a Metrocompetitor — a tech-friendly affluent young male, a viewer drawn to Bravo’s reality shows like “Million Dollar Listing” and “Flipping Out,” about an obsessive-compulsive high-end house flipper and renovator.  However you break it down, Bravo’s is a savvy audience, and the network recognizes this. To borrow a phrase that Michael Hirschorn, a former head of programming at VH1, once used to describe his own network, Zalaznick makes television for people who are “hip to television.” Her viewers can enjoy all the vapid consumerism on, say, “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” without imagining that they’re falling sway to the very forces that make that show catnip for advertisers. So far, Zalaznick has been able to serve, ingeniously, these two masters at once.  NBC Universal, Bravo’s parent company, is apparently eager to see what else Zalaznick can pull off. She’s now in charge of integrating sales across all the company’s women-oriented properties. Not long after NBC acquired Oxygen, the struggling women-oriented cable network, it turned over the channel as well as the languishing Web site iVillage to her. At 45, Lauren Zalaznick may not yet be the most powerful woman in television, but she is certainly one of the most influential.  When Andy Cohen swung by Zalaznick’s office one morning this summer to ask his boss a quick question, he got pulled into a conversation about a mildly painful exchange he had with her a few weeks earlier, a dialogue that suggested just how seriously Zalaznick takes the business of being hip.  “It was horrible,” Cohen remembered aloud. The confrontation happened at the downtown Manhattan restaurant Pastis, at a breakfast meeting during which Cohen made a passing reference to an exercise mixtape that he made for himself. He had called it “Fit-n-40.” (“I was being ironic!” Cohen said in her office, defending himself. “It was all new Mariah, new Madonna.”)  As Cohen and Zalaznick ate their breakfast, discussing various other work projects, Zalaznick’s mind was still on the questionable-sounding mixtape. And there were, to Zalaznick’s mind, a few other false notes that Cohen struck over the course of the conversation. Suddenly, Zalaznick let him have it. “She says: ‘Just so you know, you have become that person who thinks he knows what is going on in the universe, but you really don’t. You’re really out of it. You don’t have the same reference points as anyone,’ ” Cohen recalled.  This was a style intervention? “I don’t intervene,” Zalaznick explained. “It was a refocusing.”  Confronting her now in her office, Cohen wanted his boss to know that he’d done a self-evaluation in the weeks since her critique. He’d decided that she had been wrong. “I don’t find myself to be out of it,” he said. “I’m all good with myself.”  “Big time!” Zalaznick said, amused. “And you’re ultrafit.”  If Zalaznick came down hard on Cohen, it’s because she relies heavily on employees like him — trendy, about town — to help her figure out the precise moment when, say, Bushwick, not Williamsburg, becomes the place where hipsters in Brooklyn live; when people under 30 start watching her shows more on Web cast than on television; when a word like “fierce” is so tired it’s officially over and when it has been safely resurrected as mainstream camp. By Zalaznick’s logic, it’s the fabulous 40-year-olds who run the risk of falling behind, even more than a working mother of three like herself. “Us boring people with our 6:30 dinner reservation — we know how unhip we are,” she said to Cohen. “We know we’ve gotta work extra hard.”  In recent years, Zalaznick has distinguished herself in the industry not only as a hard worker but also as a fresh thinker. Her role in the creation myth of Bravo by now passes as legend in the relatively young cable industry. It goes like this:  In the beginning, there was “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” The show, which was already in its heyday when Zalaznick took over at Bravo, was a makeover program in which five gay men showed straight men how they, too, could groom and consume in good taste. Its blockbuster success transformed Bravo, formerly a sleepy, arty network best known for “Inside the Actors Studio” and a show about Cirque du Soleil.  Just as Lifetime had become the weepy-movie network, Bravo could have become, in the hands of another executive, the “Queer Eye” network, creating spinoff after spinoff until the channel collapsed under the weight of all that derivative material. Zalaznick’s insight was to create or champion programming that took the thematic components of “Queer Eye” — fashion, design, pop culture, food and beauty — and made something new. She did it with “Project Runway,” and again with “Top Chef” and “Top Design,” to name just a few shows. “She’s seen as the true innovator and best practitioner in this one form of television building,” says Evan Shapiro, president of IFC TV and the Sundance channel. “She was able to take a hit and use it as a departure point to create extensions and brands, rather than having the network rise and fall based on the lifespan of that one show. It’s one of the most influential theories in television, especially reality television, in the last five years.”  Bravo’s docudramas and competition shows, as different as the two genres are, bridge, as “Queer Eye” did, the gay-straight divide. A show like “Project Runway,” cast heavily with gays and minorities, plays so earnest it’s downright straight — the viewer roots weepily for the talented son of a hardscrabble truck driver, or the striving daughter of a hardworking Korean immigrant. And shows with straight white characters like “The Real Housewives of Orange County” play as pure camp, with all that excessive décor and high hair, and all those drag-queen bust lines. Somehow, the shows have a core commonality, not least in the uniformly high production values and pitch-perfect casting. “The shows all go through some weird Bravo-ization,” says Randy Barbato, the producer.  Almost all the shows feature egocentrics who are self-aware enough to realize that they are egocentric, and who have the redeeming feature of generally being very good at what they do. They may be occasionally appalling, but they’re usually presented in such a way that some small part of each Bravo viewer — likely competitive and driven herself — can relate, at least a little.  Certainly Zalaznick herself can relate. “Lauren’s quirky and creative, but she wants to play within the corporate environment of NBC Universal, of G.E.,” says Jeff Zucker, president and C.E.O. of NBC Universal, which is owned by General Electric. “She’ll roll her eyes and complain about the bureaucracy and wonder why she has to make another command performance — and by the way, she’s first in line to make the command performance. And she’s always great about it. She loves to be on that stage — she loves center stage.”  Most television producers spend their days trying to figure out what other kinds of people want — housewives in the Midwest, 17-year-old boys in the suburbs. With Bravo, Zalaznick has created for herself the luxury of making television for an audience, in effect, of her co-workers, her dinner-party guests, her successful, liberal neighbors in Manhattan’s West Village. “What do all the shows have in common?” asks Fenton Bailey, a producer and longtime friend of Zalaznick’s. “Lauren.”  A few years ago, during the shooting of the first season of “Project Runway,” Tim Gunn, a regular on the show, attended a judging session for one of the design competitions. The designers were defending their work in front of the judges, droning on as sometimes happens in real, unedited life, when a woman who’d been standing in the auditorium, along with Gunn, approached him. He’d already noticed her, a long line of a woman in a crisp white shirt and sleek khaki pants, and decided she must be some sort of producer. “She sidestepped right next to my shoulder and turned her head to me and asked with a whisper, ‘Who’s going to watch this?’ ” Gunn remembers. “And I looked at her and said, ‘You’re confirming my worst nightmare about this show.’ ”  Gunn could be forgiven for not realizing that he was dismissing his own show to the very person who would determine its future. Whatever a network executive is supposed to look like, Zalaznick, her colleagues invariably say, doesn’t look like it.  Zalaznick’s hair is gray and occasionally untamed. She paints her toenails canary yellow. She recently showed up at the pool party of one of her producers wearing sheer Pucci pants. Zalaznick also doesn’t sound like most network executives, who generally don’t introduce themselves to strangers by announcing just what they think, good or bad, about a project in production. “Most people who are in a position like that will relentlessly hype what they do and tell you how amazing everything is,” Hirschorn, the former VH1 executive, told me. “With Lauren, there’s kind of a refreshing jolt of self-criticism.” He paused to try to figure out what it was about her that made her unusual as executives go. “You sort of get the sense,” he went on, “that she’s part of the game but not fully submerged in it.”  Unlike most NBC executives, Zalaznick didn’t work her way up through the ranks. She didn’t go to business school; as an undergraduate at Brown, she majored in semiotics, a theoretically supercharged approach to cultural criticism. After graduating from college, she worked for a few years doing production work on big-budget films, but by her mid-20s, she’d thrown herself into the independent-film world, producing, along with Christine Vachon of Killer Films, small, arty critical darlings like “Swoon,” a black-and-white film based on the murderous lovers Leopold and Loeb, and “Kids,” the gritty, disturbing film, written by Harmony Korine, about a set of debauched New York City teenagers.  The leap from producing “Kids” to producing “Tabatha’s Salon Takeover” may look, to some, more like a fall. To Zalaznick, though, independent film and cable television present essentially the same challenges and require the same sort of executive resourcefulness. “I’ve got no budget, no stars — but I’ve got to win,” she told me. But Zalaznick also wants to make the case that Bravo’s docudramas are on the same end of the artistic continuum as “Kids.” “They’re right there,” she said, putting her hands close together. She offered a comparison between the delinquent protagonist of “Kids” and a character on “Real Housewives”: “Here’s this kid, you have no idea what’s going on with him, and this woman, you have no idea what’s going on with her and her friends and what they all do, all day every day, and you don’t know ... and now you do. And they’re both kind of disturbing, and they’re both kind of amusing, and they’re always really interesting.”  Zalaznick still sounds more like a semiotics major than like the typical corporate cheerleader. To her, what she’s producing isn’t rampant consumerism on display to be emulated or mocked, or both — it’s a form of social anthropology, a cultural text as worthy of analysis as any other, an art form suitable for her intellect. She invests even the small details of pop culture with great significance: correctly guess the year that a minor film — say, “Private Benjamin” — was made (1980), and Zalaznick will grant a cool, appraising “Good for you.” She doesn’t say it lightly; she says it as if maybe she has underestimated you, as if there’s some useful cultural attunement going on in your brain after all. What others might consider a useless piece of trivia, Zalaznick sees as a moment of our history: that which represents now, yesterday or tomorrow.  If Zalaznick’s name sounds familiar, it may be because it still appears in the production credits on countless reruns on VH1, where she entered corporate America after spending all those years working in independent film.  On Feb. 26, 1996, a young producer named Tad Low sent his agent a fax updating her about a meeting he’d just had with Zalaznick, who’d recently been bumped up to vice president of original programming and development at VH1. “She’s a fresh breath of competency in an otherwise-clueless network,” Low wrote.  Zalaznick was hired at VH1 in 1994, as vice president of on-air promotion, to help the channel define its image. (Throughout Zalaznick’s indie-film years, she and Phelim Dolan, her husband and business partner, made commercials and promos for MTV and other networks.) In the halls of Viacom, Zalaznick was an improbable figure. Her short hair, which was prematurely gray, “looked like it had been cut by a Cuisinart,” Low recalls. “She didn’t care, and that was the point.”  At the time, Low was fighting for a concept he and his partner, Woody Thompson, had hit on: a show that would run music videos while peppering them with little talk-bubbles of commentary, revealing insider tidbits about the musicians or the making of the video: that Jewel lived in her car for two years; that the Jackson family used a wax dummy of Michael Jackson from Madame Tussaud’s for the 1984 video “Torture” because he never showed up for the shoot. Often the tidbits were slightly mocking, giving the viewer a kind of prepackaged critical distance from the videos. With backing from select VH1 executives, chief among them Zalaznick, the show, “Pop-Up Video,” became both a critical and commercial success, helping define a clear identity for the struggling channel: hip, knowing and self-referential.  Zalaznick, a bit of an intellect with a low threshold of patience for the entertainment world’s pretensions, was the perfect champion for the project. Low says that she often knew how to navigate the system when lawyers wanted to keep the tidbits light and controversy-free. “She saw the necessity to keep the facts truthful, regardless of whether they ruffled feathers,” Low says. “She knew if we were going to pull punches, it wasn’t going to work.”  At the time, some critics argued that the show’s success signaled the advent of a new level of multitasking entertainment for the MTV generation. But in retrospect, the show’s popularity spoke to an even more significant shift in cultural consumption: a desire for entertainment that reflected everyone’s assumed collective boredom with the artifice and conventions of entertainment. Like a softer version of its MTV cousin “Beavis and Butt-head,” “Pop-Up Video” was television that let the viewer enjoy the medium while also enabling him to feel a little bit superior to it.  Zalaznick still takes great pleasure in various forms of self-referential television. She points, for example, to a favorite Bravo promotional segment that ran in the middle of a series of commercials during Bravo’s “A-List Awards Show,” hosted by Kathy Griffin, which was shown last spring. The segment appeared to be a cooking contest taking place in the middle of the awards ceremony; in actuality it was a so-called pod-buster, an ad designed to thwart DVR users from skipping over it. When one of the chefs in the “contest” asks Kathy when the commercial break starts, she tells him, “You’re in commercial.”  “That’s amazing,” Zalaznick says. “That’s a wink to the audience that says, hey, you’re watching commercials, and we know that you know that we know you’re watching commercials ... here are some more commercials. And when you get back, we’re going to be doing the same thing, as if we were actually here right now, live at the Hammerstein Ballroom, when you know that we know that you know, because you have looked at red-carpet photos for two weeks, that we’re not.”  Riding the success of “Pop-Up Video” and of other shows that followed — “The RuPaul Show,” “The VH1 Fashion Awards” — Zalaznick became a powerful player at the network. “People were terrified of her,” says Fenton Bailey, who worked with Zalaznick at VH1. “She doesn’t mince words, and she says exactly what she knows, and she knows everything. And I think people find that intimidating.”+  In 2000, when Zalaznick was still working at VH1, she and Bailey and Randy Barbato had a public contretemps that many thought would sever their collaboration. Barbato accidentally sent Zalaznick an e-mail message that he intended for Bailey. In the e-mail, he complained that Zalaznick was trying to get rid of their writers’ credits and suggested she was controlling and overcritical of him. Most infamous, he referred to her using a crude epithet, probably the crudest one reserved for women.  Zalaznick’s response was telling. She neither laughed it off nor fired anyone. Instead, a few weeks later, she wrote an essay about the experience and published it on a literary Web site called Open Letters. The essay is a thoughtful, brutally honest meditation on the expectations of a woman in power. “I’m probably regarded as being tough, fairly hardhearted, outspoken,” she wrote. “I am occasionally criticized for digging in and being less accommodating to other people’s ideas and criticisms than I ‘should be.’ But this is a weird sort of (double) standard to be held to, especially in a ‘creative’ job where passions are usually what get ideas heard.”  She didn’t soften any of the rough edges of the experience. She didn’t even try to soften her own edges. Explaining her reasoning about whether to sever the relationship, she wrote, “In the end in this business, it’s all a matter of who needs who the most.” You can only give someone the kiss-off for good, she went on, “if you really, truly, never need that person again, and you can never really be certain of that. One Emmy Award and we’d be begging to be back in business with them.”  In retrospect, Zalaznick’s open letter resembles nothing so much as the kind of spectacle you see daily on a Bravo show like “Work Out”: a woman in power articulating her own calculations, her means of obtaining power and holding on. In analyzing the experience and exposing it to the world, Zalaznick seemed to find a way to neutralize it, somehow. No longer just a personal hurt, it became an artifact of a cultural moment, disseminated via a burgeoning medium, for group analysis. She has continued working with Bailey and Barbato, and today counts them among her close friends. After the first round of apologies, years went by before they ever discussed the episode again.  When she’s visiting Los Angeles, Lauren Zalaznick prefers to stay at the Sunset Tower Hotel, a small boutique hotel that, like Bravo itself, is a little off the beaten path and extremely high-style. In late July, Zalaznick was in town for a conference where the various networks were presenting their new lineups to the press. Whenever she can, she takes her family with her when she travels, and the five of them — Zalaznick; her husband; her son, Dale, 6; and her daughters, Lucy, 11, and Ada, 13 — sat at their usual table out of the sun on the deck by the pool overlooking the Hollywood Hills.  Dale was soon crawling on the floor among some very intriguing patio furniture. “Excuse me, sir,” Zalaznick said. Dale remained in a crouched position. “Sir,” Zalaznick repeated. “Would you care to join us, sir?” Ada, in a role that seems familiar to her, hopped up to persuade Dale to join the table, which he did in good humor, and the meal resumed. The girls, tall and funny like Zalaznick, amused each other discreetly throughout the meal before going off to swim. Dale wandered off and came back occasionally to climb onto his father’s lap.  As the interview stretched on, not one of the children interrupted Zalaznick, and she interrupted herself only to insist that Dale not eat artificial sweetener directly from the packet. “I will cause strawberries to be brought to you,” she said. Zalaznick talks to her children the way she talks to everyone else, with great seriousness that’s used for comic effect as often as it is used to convey genuine gravity. Her children seemed to have a firm grip on when their mother was in official, not-to-be-disturbed work mode.  “I’m extremely lucky,” Zalaznick said, “because my family cuts me a tremendous amount of slack. I’m a lot of person, every day, all day.” That means, diva-style, she invariably demands they pick up and move to a better hotel room. It means she once insisted that they all pose for a family photograph every single day for 365 days. It means that she briefly had to stop everything on Sunday, every week for a year, in order to enter into a database some details about that day’s obituaries in The New York Times. (She wanted to make a point about the gender discrepancy and ultimately published an article about it in Fast Company magazine.)  Her intensity also means that like most powerful people, she rubs some people the wrong way, at least at the outset. The first year or two for Zalaznick at Bravo — at NBC Universal — did not foreshadow the success that she has since had. Series after series that she experimented with came and went — “Sports Kids Moms and Dads,” “Showdogs’ Moms and Dads,” to name just two — and Zalaznick experienced a sense of fish-out-of-water alienation. “The first couple of years at NBC, people didn’t get her,” says Jeff Gaspin, who heads up NBC’s cable entertainment operations and hired her to run Bravo. “There were definitely some top executives who sort of felt, ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ ” about his faith in his hire, he remembers.  After leaving VH1 but before arriving at NBC and Bravo, Zalaznick ran Trio, a small cable channel, which she built into a successful brand like Bravo, only less commercial — it’s best known for the show “Brilliant but Canceled,” about worthy TV shows that were canceled early on. Once Zalaznick arrived at NBC, bringing a cable sensibility to NBC required a series of small, daily fights, right down to getting the NBC peacock off her Bravo stationery. Zalaznick also asked for her own research department, her own sales teams. “I still have conversations with Lauren about picking and choosing your own battles,” says Gaspin, who was also Zalaznick’s boss at VH1. “You can’t win every one.”  At the outset, in the early days of Bravo, “Project Runway” was well on its way to the brilliant-but-canceled files, but Zalaznick took an old trick from her VH1 days and started running the show around the clock during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when people would most likely be flipping channels with time on their hands. It worked; people started watching.  Even though the show was already in development when Zalaznick arrived at Bravo, it seems fitting that it would prove Zalaznick’s breakout success: it stars, after all, competitive people with strong personalities trying to make something creative, often on a tight budget, while negotiating how much to self-promote and how much to collaborate. In Season 4 of “Project Runway,” a designer named Victorya was put in an uncomfortable position, forced to give some harsh critiques to a designer with whom she had been asked to team up. Victorya apologized to the other designer but said that she couldn’t help it because she’s a passionate person who has to say what she thinks.  Did Zalaznick feel, while watching that episode, a flash of sympathy for Victorya? Does she, in general, see herself as a certain reality-television type?  “I would answer that more as a purveyor of reality TV,” Zalaznick told me. “We’re presenting over and over again the tightrope that the contestants face when they get sent home because their dish stunk on ‘Top Chef’ because the boss of that three-person challenge said, ‘I want you to do it that way,’ and you see them muttering, and the judge says, ‘You’ve got a boss, but you’ve got to show us who you are, and you’re going home.’ And then you have the other moment when she gets sent home because she dug in her heels and didn’t work well with a team. That’s not me, really, but that’s their life, and that’s most life. And that’s why reality shows are all about the very daily choices that we all have to make to get on in life.”  Suddenly, Zalaznick no longer sounded like the dispassionate executive observing the form of a show — she sounded like someone who could very well be a contestant on it. “And you look around,” she went on, quietly but intently. “And you’re a part of a corporation, and you’re part of a team, and your boss says use an NBC salesperson, and no, don’t have a head of research, and ‘She’s a fighter,’ and ‘She doesn’t know when to give up.’ ” The pool overlooking the Hollywood Hills, the kids playing in it — it all suddenly looked very far away; Zalaznick was in virtual close-up. “Well, when should I have given up?” she asked. “When I didn’t hit my number? When I didn’t grow the channel 149 percent in three years? When should I have given up?”  Earlier that month, Zalaznick was overseeing a meeting with her top management at Oxygen when someone opened the door of the conference room to announce good news. A few months earlier, when Zalaznick took over Oxygen, she and the network’s new general manager, Jason Klarman, decided to put their money on a show called “Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood,” and the show, for the first time, had exceeded a million viewers that Tuesday night. Everyone broke out into a brief round of enthusiastic applause.  Under the watch of Zalaznick and the network’s management team, Oxygen expanded the show, about the married life of the actress and heiress Tori Spelling and her husband, Dean McDermott, from a half-hour to an hour, turned the Oxygen Web site into a glitzy, interactive “Tori and Dean” photo album and started promoting the show more aggressively on the network. It helped that Tori Spelling gave birth — by scheduled C-section — the week that press packets went out about the show’s new season. “That is a photogenic baby,” Zalaznick remarked at one point. “That is a ridiculous baby that knows how to look directly into the camera.”  After the meeting broke, Zalaznick wandered out into the hallway, where a circle of Oxygen staff members were enthusiastically celebrating their recent success. Klarman was doing a little cheer, the kind of silliness that goes far to endear new management to a nervous staff.  Zalaznick watched from a short distance with what looked like detached amusement. When Zalaznick and Klarman first started working with Oxygen earlier this year, she said, they surveyed the team about its corporate culture. One thing the struggling network’s staff members said they were good at, Zalaznick said, was “celebrating their wins.” She did a quick triple take, a common comic trick of hers. It’s a wide-eyed, subtle bit of slapstick that could mean a few things — Wow, that’s great, or How dumb is that. “Good,” she said, as if addressing the Oxygen staff. “So win.”  Zalaznick and Klarman, who ran marketing and digital at Bravo, now face the task of making their gift for niche somehow more mass, proving that they can take the idea of a “bespoke” cable channel wider and work, once again, the same marketable magic they brought to Bravo.  To come up with the new slogan for Oxygen, Klarman and Zalaznick tried to find the common threads in what was working on the network. They looked at what the more successful shows — “Tori and Dean” and “The Bad Girls Club,” a reality show about a bunch of overopinionated, hard-drinking and -fighting women living together — had in common, just as they tried to pin down what it was that made “Queer Eye” so successful at Bravo. “I thought it was a network for women who do whatever they want and don’t give a thought to what other people think,” Klarman told me, although he threw in some profanities to emphasize just how much they did whatever they want and how little they cared about what other people think.  A branding expert they hired came up with a phrase that Klarman thought was close: “Breathe Out Loud.” It wasn’t quite right — a little too New Age, a little too “Calgon, Take Me Away.” He preferred another alternative suggested by a different branding company: “Mix It Up.” Zalaznick instead chose a version of the original line that Klarman had tweaked to perfection: “Live Out Loud.” It’s a tag line with legs and has become a catch phrase among Zalaznick’s crew. The rap star Coolio, who is starring in a new show on Oxygen, says something humiliating about his daughters to the press? He’s living out loud. The phrase does just what Zalaznick says she hopes her programming achieves: it takes behavior that some might dismiss as base and gives it value, even virtue.  In the age of the DVR, television executives are searching for new ways to bolster their bottom lines. That’s why Zalaznick changed Bravo’s name to Bravo Media and started selling branded cookbooks and guides to style. It’s why reruns of the “Real Housewives” series feature a small graphic at the bottom of the screen that asks viewers if they like the outfit they’re looking at and that directs them to Bravotv.com, where they can click on a link to buy something just like it. (Online, those show segments are called shopisodes.) That’s why contestants on “Project Runway” are running rampant through a Hershey’s store looking for design inspiration or listening earnestly to a design executive at Levi’s tell them their challenge is to capture “the spirit of originality and creativity” of Levi’s jeans.  Zalaznick, like NBC itself, has always been bullish on product integration — at least that’s something she can creatively control. (Network executives are as bored by most TV commercials as everyone else.) On “Project Runway,” Tim Gunn invokes the Bluefly Accessories Wall with a reverence and regularity that’s more ritual than rote. There’s nothing coy about the sponsorship, which announces itself so obviously it’s almost retro chic.  But every once in a while, the network’s integration of sponsorship misses the right balance of irreverence and bravado. On Bravo’s “A-List Awards,” which ran last June, the Chrysler Award for design innovation went to Wii Fit, a game produced by Nintendo. Here was an award named for a major sponsor, Chrysler, going to a heavy-hitting advertiser. Even having Simon Doonan, the beloved design pundit and the creative director of Barneys, introduce the award (with a sincere paean to Chrysler’s history of design innovation) couldn’t sprinkle enough sparkly dust on the moment to cover up the layers of grease.  Discussing the subject over lunch early this summer, Zalaznick sounded as if she found the whole subject of brand integration, to borrow a word her underlings dread seeing in her e-mail feedback, “bo-ring.” “I have very high regard for personal responsibility,” Zalaznick told me. “I think that you have a high responsibility to watch Warner Brothers cartoons and somehow impart knowledge to yourself or your child that hitting someone over the head with a frying pan isn’t that funny, and your head won’t be shaped like a frying pan until you shake it out and a sound effect pops in.”  Zalaznick’s untroubled embrace of product placement seems a little hard to reconcile with her overall aversion to all things phony. This is a woman who considers dyeing your hair a sign of inauthenticity, who’s known, and loved, and a little bit feared, for her willingness to say what she thinks. Here’s a woman whose creative strength lies in trying to capture — whether it’s in “Kids” or in “The Real Housewives of Orange County” — some essence of the mundane, though real, details of people’s lives.  But the leap from the programming she has developed to product placement isn’t that far, considering that her shows, like so many others, often expose the realities of television-making itself. There’s a dotted line connecting “Pop-Up Video” and reality TV at its most clever — for example, Bravo’s “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List,” which takes viewers on her auditions to be a spokeswoman for QVC or deconstructs, in great detail, the process by which celebrities get their pictures into tabloids. If 66 percent of consumers surveyed by Entertainment Weekly say they don’t mind product integration, that’s because they’ve been placed squarely inside the industry process. Insult our intelligence with product placement? Impossible, since we know that they know that we know exactly how this business works.  For the past five years or so, marketers have been throwing around the term “masstige” to describe a new interest in the middle and upper-middle classes in achieving luxury items — maybe they can’t afford the BMW, but they can swing the $400 Coach bag and certainly the $5 Starbucks latte, as opposed to the cup of coffee from the corner deli. The rise of masstige has surely been fed by a sense of reciprocity that has characterized celebrity coverage: “Just like us!” promises Us Weekly. If Martha Stewart can shop at Costco, the P.T.A. Trendsetter can shop at Louis Vuitton.  Masstige is all over Bravo, a premium purveyor of luxury goods with a viewership that’s affluent but not exactly rolling in money. Television has always served primarily to sell stuff (after or before all those scenes at E.R.’s and precincts and coffee shops). Zalaznick’s innovation was to make the actual narrative itself about people selling stuff, and buying it too, whether it’s clothing, as on “Real Housewives,” or real estate, on shows like “Flipping Out.”  What has made the programming watchable, all along, is the same thing that might keep it relevant as the economy changes, which is a certain winking skepticism about buying and selling. It’s what’s ingenious, or insidious, depending on the perspective, about the complexity of the Bravo programming. Even as the programs allow the viewer a way out — we all know all this spending is over the top — they still seem to work magic for advertisers. Consider the hairstylist Jonathan Antin on the defunct show “Blow Out” being filmed making a commercial for his new hair-care line. The plot is that he’s a diva. The dialogue is Jonathan Antin saying over and over, as he films different takes for his pitch, some variation of the following: “Shampoo is an incredibly important first step for your day.” He is laughable, this statement is laughable. And yet, if you sell shampoo, could you ask for a better advertising environment?  Zalaznick says she doesn’t like to describe her shows as “ironic” — she prefers “layered.” “You want to be a little bit like one of them?” she says of the shows. “Here’s a guidebook. You want to laugh at them? Go ahead. My sister was a devotee of ‘Real Housewives’ early on — ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe what a good mother I am.’ ”  “The Rachel Zoe Project,” “Flipping Out,” “Real Housewives” — they’re all entertaining personality portraits but also morality plays about consumerism that still drive people to go and buy things. “Darn tooting!” Zalaznick says, sounding more Tina Fey than Sarah Palin. “We know for a fact Bravo is the most engaged network — the most people who see a commercial on Bravo, of any other network, remember that ad and think more highly of a product! So think about that statistic! That statistic is true!” Sixty-three percent of Bravo’s viewers recall the name of the brands they’ve seen advertised on Bravo, and 26 percent say that after seeing a product placement on Bravo, they have an improved opinion of the product.  “That’s nuts, right?” Zalaznick says. “But what’s my job? My job is to entertain people and deliver a bottom line at a company. Now I’ve done both, and I can punch the clock, punch out and go home. I’m done. That was my shift.”  Like everyone else, Zalaznick has been trying to figure out what the new economic reality means for what she sells, and to whom she’s selling it. “For two years, we’ve been thinking to ourselves and saying out loud in strategy meetings and in elevator rides, hey, ours is the most affluent, most educated cable entertainment audience ... what happens if they’re less affluent? What do we do?” Zalaznick said from her office late last month. If she had stepped outside for lunch, she would have seen, within a few feet of her office, the news running across the NBC news ticker an hour or so later: “Germany approved a $650 billion package for country’s financial markets ... part of a coordinated European bailout effort amid volatile markets. Chrysler’s chief executive is refusing to comment on reports of accelerating merger talks between Chrysler and General Motors. ”  One answer, said Zalaznick, might be a nightly show in which a host would interview characters from the various other shows, about the relation between events on their shows and current events. “We know we just showed you an episode about someone buying $1,500 shoes,” she said. “Here’s what’s important about that, or here’s what’s funny about that, here’s this person sitting on my couch to talk about that, given what’s going on in the world. It’s providing a little context, less inference — it’s not a time for subtlety.”  But don’t expect a programming revolution on the network, which isn’t quite ready to give up its proven escapist formula. “The answer,” Zalaznick said, “is that our shows were never about money.” The money is the backdrop, she said. “They’re about extreme personalities. Our stories are about the meanings of these things, and their stories and their struggles of how you get it. There’s a lot going on in the layers of their lives — someone dies, someone gets divorced, their kids are leaving the house.” Even the most jaded viewer may genuinely feel affection and concern for some of the stock characters on Bravo’s so-called docusoaps, the wise-beyond-their-years teenage daughters and sons of the characters, the young Greek chorus providing the voice of reason through the programming.  Zalaznick also expects that the financial crisis will simply play out in the narratives, as it already has (on “Million-Dollar Listing,” which was filmed two years ago, the deals were closing so slowly they had to extend the production cycle far beyond what they’d imagined). Bravo’s now starting a new show called “Miami Social,” about the lives of a circle of glamorous 20-something friends, one of whom is in advertising, one of whom is a club promoter. “And my guess is that we’re about to start shooting, and she will have ad-sales problems, and he will have no one in his clubs. And it’s about their friendship, and you see all these linkages kind of coming together and going apart.”  Is she worried no one wants to watch a show about an empty club? “Why are you watching Zoila clean Jeff Lewis’s house?” Zalaznick asked, referring to a long-suffering maid on the show “Flipping Out.” “I don’t know!” All she knows is that they do.  In a tight financial environment, television will most likely continue on in the direction it’s going, only more so: more product placement, more overt sponsorship, more television about the making of commercials for products that can be bought on the network’s Web sites. (On MTV in late October, there was Paris Hilton on “My New BFF” directing a bevy of competitors to make the best commercial for one of her products — “Sex always sells!”)  The wealthy characters on the shows will probably be a little less wealthy, but they won’t be moving in with their parents, and they might not even curb their spending. Bailey said he tried to pitch a show to another network about people getting their debt under control and learning to live within their means, and was told no one would watch it. Now he and Barbato are talking to Bravo about a new show, one that would be set in Dubai, “the new frontier, the new location of the American dream, where there’s no income tax, people go to reinvent themselves.”  Zalaznick says she’s also not so sure that the world that she and her colleagues portray, satirize, document and deconstruct is changing so fast. She promised to forward to me an e-mail invitation for an incredibly lavish party that someone passed on to her, for her amusement, just a few days after the new bailout plan was announced. “I mean, there was time to cancel, right?” she said. “They could have canceled.”  She forwarded the invitation, which was for a bat mitzvah that included, for the bat mitzvah girl’s bevy of friends and family, a luncheon at Le Bernardin and then, a few days later, a party at the Chanel store in SoHo, which the family had closed down for their festivities.  Whatever else she made of such excess, Zalaznick recognized that it was good for business. Her parting words: “Rock on, Real Housewives of N.Y.C.”  The cover article this weekend about Lauren Zalaznick, a television executive, misstates part of the address of her Manhattan office. It is 30 Rockefeller Plaza, not Center.  The cover article on Nov. 2, about Lauren Zalaznick, head of the Bravo TV network, misstated a word in the title of one its programs. It is “Inside the Actors Studio,” not Artist’s Studio.  Susan Dominus, a longtime contributor to the magazine, writes the Big City column for The New York Times.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM38 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: THE AFFLUENCER. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Lauren Zalaznick, the head of the Bravo network, has taken her own elite, urban, downtown sensibility and brought it into America’s living rooms.