The Z woman gets the NYT treatment

Lauren Zalaznick is one of my favoritest people in the whole business of television. We got to know each other when she was hired to shepherd a tiny little cable channel called Trio for the Universal Cable Group that was eventually sold to NBC. Kansas City was one of about a dozen cable systems in the country that got Trio, and I loved how she used attitude and a splash of color to make something out of nothing.

This weekend, she's the subject of one of those way-too-up-close-and-personal profiles that the New York Times Sunday Magazine specializes in: 8,300 words about her and her career, which currently is running a major chunk of the growing NBC Universal cable empire. Trio died, but by then it was already living on at Bravo, which the Z woman took over and began to apply exactly the same smart makeover that she brought to Trio.

In the Times story, Trio gets exactly one sentence, but I don't know how you write about the job Zalaznick has done at Bravo without writing about Trio as the warmup act. When I read her complaining about Bravo to the Times writer, Susan Dominus, "I’ve got no budget, no stars," I had to laugh. Compared with the budget she had at Trio, Zalaznick is a friggin' Cecil B. de Mille these days.