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.
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