The Real Housewives Of New Jersey: Season Finale
The season finale of the Real Housewives of New Jersey has been a constant presence since the show began. It's all been building up to this fateful dinner party, with the yelling, and the fighting, and the spilling. Such suspense is easy enough to sustain, but impossible to deliver. Anything that might have been surprising has already been teased out over the past month and a half. We know that Jacqueline yells at someone. We know that Teresa flips a table over. We know that Danielle's face melts into her ziti. And so it was last night, exactly as foretold (by the prophecy of the teaser ads).
But first, Teresa wants to show Dina her new whites only country club house.
This thing is huge, and lavish, and completely uncomfortable looking. It might be the complete lack of any furniture.
Where is Jack Nicholson supposed to type his crazies?
After giving the tour, Teresa tells Dina that she wanted to have a house warming party, but the house isn't ready yet, so she's going to have a dinner party at a restaurant instead, and she's going to invite Danielle. HAHAHA. Right. This show seriously should have just been called The Real Producers Intervention Of New Jersey, for all the intervening that the producers are constantly doing. The thing is, we all know how house warming parties work! And they don't work by throwing a dinner party at a restaurant and inviting someone you claim to hate who just happens to be on the same reality show as you and also only inviting other people from the reality show! Whatever.
Meanwhile, Jacqueline's parents come to visit in their tour bus.
Warped Tour 2009 is going to be siiiick.
They once again discuss the issue of Jacqueline's daughter being given a brand new car and whether or not that's a good idea as if she isn't already basically ruined. Look, I recognize that some children go through difficult phases in their adolescence and that unless you are a parent you can't know what it's like, and that sometimes these troubled kids still end up pulling through in the end and making something out of themselves. That being said, I'm pretty sure that when you take those kids right in the middle of their troubled period and throw them onto a reality show that you signed up, it's probably over. The game is lost. Throw her on the junk pile. She is still a child! I hope this does not happen! But her mom has made some recklessly bad decisions in regards to her well being!
Also, Caroline is best friends with Bernard Kerik? And he helps her train her dog to murder intruders?
Is this real life?
Bernard Kerik, making nothing but the wisest decisions when it comes to his public image. Always. This show is a SKYROCKET TO RESPECT.
And so we come to the dinner. Danielle brings "The Book." She places it on the table. She places it at what she claims to be a "45 degree angle pointing at Dina." Relax, Mathlete. For one thing, she doesn't actually do that, she just sets it down.
For another thing, no one is busy wondering what kind of coded messages you are using in your placement of "The Book," everyone is just wondering where this is going to go. And the answer is straight into the poop shed. To be fair, Danielle just wanted an opportunity to "explain" herself, which I guess is fine. She has to do that a lot. And Reality TV was, is, and always has been about giving people a fair shake. Dina tries to cut Danielle off, but Caroline insists on letting Danielle speak. She explains that the only thing in the book that is true is that she was arrested and that she changed her name. Whatever. I know that books can be full of lies, but based on the many things that this book purportedly contains, that is so many lies! Nevertheless, Danielle makes another completely fair point which is that she respects the family for wanting to "protect itself" from her but that she doesn't understand why they had to go all around town showing the book to everyone. That is almost a really good point! There is just one problem:
The grand lie of this entire season is not that these women have human value but that this book was somehow discovered. These women barely seem to have the intellectual engagement required to clip coupons out of the Sunday circular. They did not sleuth down this fucking book. The producers found it six months ago when they were doing background checks during casting. And they sat on it for three whole episodes. The end. MYSTERY SOLVED. But that doesn't resolve WHO TOOK THE BOOK TO THE HAIR SALON!
Dina's defense is that "she never had the book in [her] hand," which, nice one Dina. That is why I married you, in my mind. What a Yellow Pages lawyer defense that is. So cunning! Cunning like a retarded fox! Then Caroline busts out that she was the one who spread all the rumors. Danielle isn't buying it, and neither is anyone else, because it just feels like an obvious fake out. Caroline is 12 years older than these women, and has bigger tits, and doesn't give a FUCK. She can withstand whatever Danielle or the Real Housewives fanbase might throw at her, literally. Her body can literally absorb the shock. So she takes a bullet for Dina. But it doesn't really work. And so there is just more screaming. And I'm all for "protecting your house," Caroline, but maybe you should have protected your house by keeping your house off of this terrible show?
Jacqueline gets involved, but Jacqueline is literally one of the stupidest people in the entire world, so who cares that Jacqueline gets involved. She claims that she is doing the right thing by standing up for Danielle, but Jacqueline doesn't know what the words "right" or "thing" even mean. Seriously, she's dumb. I'm sorry.
You know who else is kind of crazy dumb? TERESA! What is this all about?
LOLOLOL. Whatever, Teresa. I think her breast implants are poisoning her brain. Either that or making her a genius. It's hard to tell. "Prostitution whore" is really smart.
So, is anything resolved?
I'll take that as a no. Jacqueline's husband Chris does give an inspired speech about being grateful for what you have and forgiveness and tolerance that the producers were kind enough to write for him, because nope.
In the end it's hard to tell with this season if any of these women got what they were hoping to get, whatever that may have been. With the other seasons there was such an air of desperation and status anxiety that no matter how humiliating the results, you got the sense that the bargain was mostly a fair one. In return for their national status as joke-butt, they got the attention they so ferociously desired. But this time it's different. This time it's hard to tell what they want. Don't get me wrong, these women are obviously bottomless wells of insecurity and sucking want, but there's a certain confidence and self-satisfaction about them as well. It almost seems as if they just did the show because life in New Jersey is, well, boring. Makes sense.
The end.
Posted by Gabe at 11:45 AM in Reality TV
Tags: The Real Housewives Of New Jersey
HOLY....SHIT....TERESA.... CALM DOWN.
Score = 3
Wait, this season is over? There were like two episodes! Just another way in which Bravo has continued to challenge my conception of "reality"!
Score = 5
So the finale was anticlimactic as expected, but it had it's moments. When Caroline said to Danielle "Look me in the eye, because I'm the one who told did it", I got goosebumps. Not that it was a shocking revelation, but the way she said it so stone cold, that was some straight gangsta shit right there.
Score = 7
That video was CHOCK FULL O' NUTS.
Score = 1
Teresa frightened me last night. She got violent when she was "disrespected." And there's a very bad smell in her basement. Those dots are not difficult to connect.
Score = 14
i was going to make a joke about Bernard Kerik (really!?) getting his SAG card (clearly what he's been angling for the entire time)...but i supposed people on reality shows aren't TECHNICALLY actors...even though they're mostly acting all the time...and therefore can't be a SAG member. my intensive 3 minute google search backs this up.
Score = 1
I love how Theresa asked that her children leave the room when Danielle was flipping her shit, but she was o fine with having her kids there while she talked about how big of a hornball her husband is and how she just lies there during sex. That's right Theresa, you are a classy lady.
Score = 6
Teresa will rape your children with her mouth.
Score = 4
Teresa was just a victim of bubbie rage.
Score = 4
"Prostitution whore" - I never thought I'd read such a shit crap word phrase on an internet website... so repetitively redundant.
Score = 7
People who are utterly irrelevant but too stupid to realize it can appear confident and self-satisfied. Even insecurity requires some self-awareness. These cut up whores are easily Bravo's skankiest batch yet.
Score = -1
What's sad is this is the first Real Housewives to live up to it's name. Real Housewives don't have careers, don't have charities, don't get mentioned in Page 6, don't have awful entrepreneurial dreams. That's what made the other seasons so good.
RHONJ was a wall of suck that I'm embarrassed to say I rammed my head into for 6 episodes.
Score = 0
Have you ever heard of mountain and mole hill?
Score = 16
I think Danielle kidnapped "her" daughters from some other mother. Perhaps that's the kidnapping they describe in Cop Without a Badge. One big hint was something she said to "her" kids last night about how she's "built up this relationship" with them over the years. Uh...
Also, they look so unlike her (and I mean her appearance then AND now). The older one looks just like Mariel Hemingway.
Score = 1
NHONJ was a waste of time! But that's BRAVO for you!
Score = 0
I loved when Danielle talked about the "rumors" about her sleeping with married men, but did air quotes on the word rumors, thus admitting she sleeps with married men.
Score = 6
Just have to say: when the housewives were on the Today Show a couple weeks back, Jacqueline was noticeably absent. After the last minute of last nights show I'm convinced Caroline and Dina and "The Family" had her whacked.
(even though she was preg and I assume she must have been in labor, recently given birth or something along those lines, let's just pretend for a minute)
Score = 1
When Bernie Kerik came on the screen, I called my mom and said "DID BERNIE KERIK JUST SHOW UP ON MY SCREEN BEST FRIENDS WITH THE CRAZY MOBBED-UP LADY?" and then five minutes later I had to call her back and say "DID BERNIE KERIK JUST SHOW UP ON MY SCREEN TRAINING GERMAN SHEPHERDS TO KILL PEOPLE BY ATTACKING IT WITH A STICK?" She said yes.
Score = 4
Is Theresa's husband strangling her to get her to shut up at the end of that clip?!
Score = 0
A hearty "kahdooz" to all these lovely, older "Housewives!"
KAHDOOZ!!
Score = 2
hows come danielle (and bitchface jacqueline) ALWAYS uses the air quotes when saying "the book"? its not like its not really a book. its a book. that doesnt need air quotes. dumb.
Score = 1
Holy hairline, Teresa! Teeny-tiny two-head.
Score = 0
I love how Danielle's kids are just standing around in the background completely not phased by the entire spectacle. Have they seen it all before? Do they think it's funny? Do they realize how fake and scripted it is?
Score = 1