And so he is these days often trying to figure out a metric by which he can ascertain where he falls in the fame food chain. In “Superficial,” there’s a diary entry in which he talks about getting a last-minute invitation from his good friend Sarah Jessica Parker to be her date for the Met Gala — so that’s data. But he goes to Ralph Lauren to get a tux for the event and the one he likes is being held for Bobby Cannavale, and he spends a little time trying to process that he doesn’t have more pull than Bobby Cannavale. Another tux he likes is being held for Johnny Depp, which is O.K. with him, because of course Johnny Depp.

“It didn’t piss me off,” he insisted when I asked about the incident and his calculations surrounding it. “No. I was like, oh, O.K., oh, good, here’s a ranking, and now I know where I stand. They’re telling me where I stand. I’m finding out how this works.” He paused for a second. “I’m just psyched that I’m getting a tux.”

O.K., maybe it did sting a little when Vanity Fair had an article devoted to the hosts of late night, and Cohen seemed to be the only one excluded from it. Trevor Noah hadn’t even made his debut yet! But again, this is just data.

“Everything’s good,” he insisted. “I have my health. I have my show. I have my life. You know what I mean?” But also, “I think my show is a late show, you know?”

Don’t read any of this as defeated or bitter. If there’s one thing about Cohen, it’s that his respect for the democratic rhythms of popular culture and popularity in general is total. He wants to watch the rise and fall of things, even himself, without trying to manipulate the process. He wants it all to play out. The people will decide, and watching what the people decide and how they decide is far more important than the decision itself.

From a young age, there was something about Andy Cohen that his mother couldn’t quite put her finger on. They would watch “All My Children” together during the Greg-and-Jenny era (1983-86ish), which she wondered if maybe other sons weren’t doing with their mothers. He had a Diana Ross poster on his wall. What was it, though? What was it? Then one day, she was watching him “prance” (her word) across the stage in his high school’s performance of “Carousel,” and a notion crept in and took hold. She got home that night and looked under his bed, where she found a healthy stash of gay porn. Now she was sure something was going on, but what? She spoke with a psychologist she knew who understood gay issues because he had a gay relative, and that psychologist told her that maybe she should stop looking under his bed. Andy was about to leave for college, for Boston University, and the psychologist said, “B.U. is a good place for him to go for that, he’ll meet a lot of other gay people,” and now his mother really began to suspect something was up. A few years later, Cohen wrote a coming-out letter to a friend that he left on his parents’ kitchen table, and his mother read it and sat him down and asked him if he was sure. And he told her he was. A mother always knows.

He knew he wanted to be onscreen even in high school, but he didn’t want to play characters. He wanted to be famous for being himself, but at the time, that idea didn’t truly exist yet outside the news and shows like Oprah and “Donahue.” “I liked the idea of being myself in front of the camera. So, just me being me. I used to think if I could work on a morning show then I could be me.” He got a job as an intern at CBS News, then as a producer there, but he started to burn out after 10 years. After a four-year run at the short-lived Barry Diller cable network Trio, he landed at Bravo, where he helped develop breakout successes like “Top Chef” and “The Millionaire Matchmaker.” Lauren Zalaznick, at the time president of Bravo, recalls someone coming in with hundreds of hours of documentary tape from a gated community in Orange County, Calif., which the producers needed to work. In that footage, Cohen saw something. “I don’t want to pretend like it was like lightning in a bottle at the beginning,” he said. “I was like: ‘This is a soap opera. This is a soap opera.’ ” It was also something else. “This is real life.”’