<table> </table> When the economy goes into the toilet, what happens to a cable channel devoted to chronicling the lifestyles of the rich and famous?</p><p>In the case of Bravo, it actually gets richer.</p><p>The upwardly mobile, gay-friendly lifestyle channel owned by NBC Universal reported this week that ratings for February were the highest in Bravo&#8217;s history.</p><p>While Hollywood develops sitcoms about people looking for work, a record 2 million viewers watched the fourth season of &#8220;The Real Housewives of Orange County.&#8221; Bravo has used the ironically named series about shopaholic trophy brides to create a year-round franchise with spinoffs filmed in New York City, Atlanta and, coming in April, New Jersey.</p><p>More than 2.5 million viewers this month tuned in for the latest &#8220;Top Chef&#8221; competition, in which aspiring gourmets cook the kinds of meals that would cost the average American the equivalent of a week&#8217;s worth of groceries.</p><p>And last week Kathy Griffin, the onetime sitcom sidekick whose career was so perilously close to obscurity that she turned it into a Bravo series, &#8220;My Life on the D-List,&#8221; signed a book deal to write her memoir for a reported $2.2 million. The figure led the Defamer blog to observe, &#8220;We fear that the book industry may be losing its grip on reality.&#8221;</p><p>Indeed, the media have been almost uniformly brutal toward Bravo since Wall Street started to go south. Bloggers and print critics have found it incongruous that a TV channel would be celebrating &#8220;real housewives&#8221; who can afford spa treatments and second homes while millions of actual housewives are getting pink slips and seeing their ARM payments skyrocket.</p><p>The <em>New York</em><em>Post </em>tut-tutted the Feb. 17 season premiere of the NYC &#8220;Housewives,&#8221; in which Alex McCord and husband Simon van Kampen spent $8,000 on clothing at a Hamptons boutique, noting that the couple&#8217;s &#8220;extravagance will likely strike viewers as prodigal in the extreme.&#8221;</p><p>Another critic wrote, &#8220;What I found amusing a year ago is no longer so laughable. It makes me wonder if Bravo&#8217;s wealth-based programming has jumped the Louis Vuitton-monogrammed polo pony.&#8221;</p><p>So who&#8217;s behind the times &#8212; Bravo, or its proletarian critics? I decided to ask Lauren Zalaznick, who oversees Bravo for NBC Universal and whose candor and thoughtfulness set her apart from most top TV executives. I read her the polo-pony quote and she said:</p><p>&#8220;What&#8217;s so amazing and great is there&#8217;s a very, very, very external and unemotional arbiter of that statement and that arbiter is the television audience. And they are telling us that they&#8217;re not done with us in a very simple way &#8212; in fairly extraordinary ratings growth and higher levels of engagement across the platforms that we design for them to tell us what they think.&#8221;</p><p>She&#8217;s referring not only to the bravotv.com Web site but to one of Bravo&#8217;s highest-rated time periods of the week: the &#8220;Info Frame&#8221; hour at 8 p.m. Wednesdays, when a popular show is repeated with a blue frame that pops up announcing contests, polls and feedback that viewers text in throughout the hour.</p><p>&#8220;So not only are they enjoying (these shows) the first time around with their aspirational qualities, beautiful casting, lovely locations, terrific houses, delicious food and stylish clothes &#8212; they&#8217;re also enjoying all of the information we share about the program,&#8221; Zalaznick said.</p><p>As for the charge that she&#8217;s indifferent to the shifting economic tides, Zalaznick points to the moment when she made her first programming adjustment based on the collapsing economy. It was the spring of 2007 &#8212; long before the recession even officially began.