Sunday night’s explosive finale of “RHONJ” revealed that the show has reached a point it can’t come back from. Where does the once-loved reality series go from here?
The Real Housewives of New Jersey may have died with its explosive finale, but nothing truly stays dead in the world of reality TV. Already, Andy Cohen is teasing a reboot, while rumors swirl in every direction about the show’s future, as fans deliberate how to save this once tentpole show.
RHONJ will almost certainly continue, but how that will be is entirely unclear. How do you save a show that’s so irreparably damaged?
One thing is clear: Teresa Giudice can no longer be a Real Housewife,
This is a statement that comes not as an indictment of her run, but an endorsement. She is the quintessential Housewife to many general viewers, someone who has bled for the show in ways that helped it skyrocket to such an elite status.
But Teresa brings with her an enormous weight. Bravo inevitably doomed RHONJ the second it became the Teresa show in Season 3, putting an albatross around the series’ neck. There is no RHONJ without Teresa, sure, but as we saw from this finale: There’s no longer one with her, either.
Any new additions inevitably will know too much about Teresa to arrive impartially, and the need to define yourself in relation to Teresa has weighed down this show long enough. It’s clear Teresa won’t go far—House of Villains is also under the NBCUniversal umbrella—especially if rumors of a Bravo kids spinoff involving Gia carry weight, so she’s likely to enter her next act as a Luann DeLesseps or Dorinda Medley, floating from show to show while Bravo brainstorms a new, more permanent home for her.
And with a Teresa exit comes Melissa’s demise. Not only does getting rid of Melissa make sense from the perspective that she brought less than anyone else to screen this year, it’s also necessary to wipe the slate clean. That way, she doesn’t win—and neither does Teresa. Whoever returns without the other will always have that victory lap mentality, and it’s one that would paint an unnecessary shadow over the rest of the show.
Beyond that, no true decisions can be made. The show is intensely warped by toxicity, a disease that has buried Margaret and Jennifer under the weight of their own drama. Jennifer has had a brutal season, and the off-screen reveal of her blog-leaking habits delivered a final blow to her shaky standing.
And Margaret has completed her arc now that she’s gone full-villain. She’s a cunning, master manipulator who’s awe-inspiring in her machinations, yet ultimately, you can’t trust her. You can’t remove the mask concealing Margaret’s demonic underbelly only to have her return for a fresh start months later. I do hope to see her on The Traitors very soon, though, as there’s no doubt in my mind she will kill someone for real—and get away with it.
That leaves Rachel, Danielle, Dolores, and Jenn Fessler, and the truth is, that’s not the basis for a successful show. It’s not unnoticed by me that Danielle got the finale’s only true solo scene, setting up further reconciliation with her father. Dolores’ role as the episode’s narrator is clearly in an effort to position herself for the future, too. Jenn, too, undoubtedly deserves a crack at full-time (she earned one this year much more than most of her peers), yet none would get a fair go of things under the current circumstances.
The right way to fix RHONJ isn’t to blindly push through by sending consolation prizes to the only women leftover from this massacre. The reserve is depleted, and RHONJ is a victim of its own making. I’m anti-clean slate reboots, a la the RHONY method, so the smartest method is simply to wait, rather than making snap judgments. A rushed reboot would simply deliver the final blow to an already decimated franchise.
More than anything, I hope Bravo takes the time to learn from this failure. Don’t let a Real Housewives show revolve around one Housewife. Don’t be too scared to tweak the cast year-to-year in order to keep things fresh. Don’t assume good ratings mean you can get complacent and fans will just eat up whatever slop you offer. Don’t let husbands take over a show that’s about women. Don’t use the same intro for eight years, either!
Consider that The Real Housewives of Orange County has added at least one new Housewife every single season—an impressive feat, given there are 18–and is now in a renaissance. These minor changes have helped the show transition through many stages of life and kept things from ever truly falling apart. The most dire era (Seasons 15 and 16) was saved by smart casting decisions that provided a link to the past as well as a path to the future, and RHOC at its worst was far more coherent than the dumpster fire we’re witnessing here.
With time, we’ll likely remember Season 14 more fondly than we do today. Bravo has never attempted a “final” season like this before, and all things considered, this delivered in a very unique way. It’s very rare in the reality TV world that you get to mourn, as things change and progress to such a rapid degree. But we’ve had months to accept that RHONJ as we know it is over, and this season has routinely proven exactly why the “teams” mentality is so dire to both the Housewives and the fanbase.
You can spend all of that time in pursuit of vindication, but that’s not what Housewives is about. Today’s heroes are more often than not tomorrow’s villains, and there’s no sense in moralizing when each Housewife has done heinous things in their own pursuit to win it all. There’s a reason Bravo canned Monica Garcia from The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City rather than allowing the show to go deeper into the hole for some instant gratification. Maybe if Bravo had learned this lesson after RHONJ’s quality first fell off a cliff in Season 5 from a stagnant cast, we could’ve avoided such an inevitable outcome. Complacency is the death of reality TV.
It’s ultimately too late to save RHONJ. Whatever follows will always have to answer for the massive stink of this era, and be contextualized within that narrative. But this is reality, not some scripted entity, and the world is ultimately unpredictable. Eventually, a path will emerge. The show will go on once RHONJ has finished marinating in its own despair. For now, we can simply appreciate what we once had, while making sure we never fall victim to such an avoidable fate again.
