Cohen and Bravo found themselves in a difficult situation when, after filming the first season of 'Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,' one of the husbands, Russell Armstrong, committed suicide. Cohen says he and others at the network had many conversations about what they should do. "I reached out to [Russell's wife] Taylor every way I could, but never heard back," he wrote. "[Executive producer and writer] Alex Baskin spoke with her many times and she was adamant that every scene be shown, that if people were really going to understand what happened.... they'd need to see all the events as they happened." Bravo ended up cutting a few scenes which now had unfortunate implications, such as another housewife complaining that she "could kill [her] husband," and a couple of scenes which showed bad events in the Armstrongs' marriage, but Russell Armstrong did feature in the series later. "We felt we'd do him a greater disservice by cutting him out entirely," Cohen wrote. "You humanize him by seeing him instead of just hearing that he's a bad guy. In the end, what we had, unfolding throughout the season's twenty episodes, was an honest depiction of what happened to a woman in the midst of an unhappy marriage."
