Last night, the much-anticipated Real Housewives of New Jersey post-finale special (as The Hollywood Reporter calls it) aired on Bravo, and it was a massive departure from tradition. Typically, when a season wraps, the audience is in for a long, drawn out, two or three-part run of special episodes where the women are prompted by Andy Cohen to revisit certain moments and conversations that played out on camera throughout the season; hash things out with their castmates; and by the end of the last installment of the reunion, the cast clinks glasses before the show goes dormant for the next several months. 

 

But this season culminated with the women watching the finale together in two separate rooms (based on their loyalty) at Rails Steakhouse, a restaurant that has been the scene of many fights on RHONJ in this season and seasons past. Essentially, it was a glorified watch party. And while it was inevitable that things would unfold a bit differently without much of the pomp and circumstance of a traditional reunion, the new format has raised a lot of questions. First, what worked? What happens next? And perhaps of equal importance, what does this mean not only for this franchise, but for Real Housewives and other reality shows as we know it moving forward?

 

The first thing that was noticeably different about this reunion was the lack of pomp and circumstance surrounding the occasion. It’s not uncommon for the cast to be flown out to New York or another city that bodes well from a scheduling and geographic perspective where all the women can meet Andy Cohen for an in-person reunion. The women are often dressed to the nines, with reunion gowns receiving major attention not only on the show but on fan accounts, and makeup artists on standby to blot and reapply overdone smoky eyes and wedding-level glam. 

Even the studios in which the women meet are often decorated, and not just your average set dec. The studios are made to resemble a place the women visited throughout the season, and these setups are elaborate. If the women took a group trip somewhere, there’s a chance the entire reunion set will be inspired by their destination. For example, in 2019, the Real Housewives of Atlanta were joined by actual koi fish in a pond that was built into the stage after they took a cast trip to Tokyo.

 

It's this kind of extravagance that we just did not see last night. Yet as a long-time fan of the show, while it can definitely be fun to watch and judge everything from the makeup to the gowns to the set decorations, there were elements of this new, pared-down format of the show that I think still managed to be a success.

First, I can’t say with certainty that had there been an additional two more episodes, that the divisions between the group would have been mended. And as Andy always reminds us, the point of reunions is reconciliation. The truth is that the long, drawn-out reunions did seem to be a growing frustration for fans who devoted a number of hours of their evenings to watch the women hash it out on screen, only for things to not end up being hashed out at all. In this way, the new format of the show worked, because it held the women accountable in real time, and in a way that Andy, through simply asking probing questions, often couldn’t. 

Despite the significance of Andy’s role as mediator, it’s even hard to say he was totally missed. With fan frustration at an all-time high in recent years over Andy missing the mark in his questions, his handling of reunions and his very evident bias and favoritism among housewives, it was kind of nice to see the women have conversations amongst themselves, reacting in real-time to things like Margaret being called a lying see-you-next-Tuesday by Dolores, which I wrote about here, and reliving the moment that Jackie revealed to Teresa that she did, in fact, meet with Louie’s ex. 

 

All of this leads me to my next question, which is whether there was a larger strategy in place regarding Andy not being present for this watch party, or whether he and the network are simply running out of ideas (or maybe budget) for formatting. Like, why would Andy run the risk of rendering himself unnecessary? He must have known that if this avenue was favoured by the audience, we may become vocal about this being the preferred format for reunions moving forward. 

While the budget and lack of new ideas are certainly plausible, my hot take is that Andy simply saw an opportunity to take advantage of the strained dynamics to try something new. We saw how stale the Real Housewives of Potomac reunion was with the women refusing to find a way forward after last season’s fist fights and brawls – perhaps he knew, after that experience, that there was no point in getting women with this much interpersonal strain together to talk, as he had done for the last 13 seasons of the show religiously.

 

Beyond that, though, the last two years have been riddled with off-camera drama. There’s been discussions of reality TV workers unionizing, lawsuits against him and the network dropping frequently, and former stars of Bravo shows have turned on him. 

All of this is part of a larger phenomenon happening in reality TV. The stars of these shows are becoming increasingly self-reliant. With the exception of Lala and Scheana from Vanderpump Rules who have made clear just how much they depend on the money they make from the show, a lot of Bravo’s cast members are no longer in the business of keeping the peace just to keep the cameras rolling. 

The other part of this phenomenon is the casting chaos it causes. We first saw this with Real Housewives of New York after allegations of racism against Eboni K. Williams, the first Black woman to be cast in the series, forced a major shakeup which brought in all new women to the show. Currently, Vanderpump Rules is in a bit of a hiatus as producers and execs mull over the options for how the show can proceed, post-Scandoval. Because in case you haven’t heard, Ariana is onto much bigger, much better things, and that’s posed an inherent problem for the show as we know it.

Bravo has kind of cannibalized itself, or lost the plot, as we see so many people say on social media these days. Many of the shows and stars have simply become too famous, and not nearly dependent on these shows enough to be told what to do. And as a former TV producer, I can tell you that it is a producer’s job to ensure good TV. How do they do that? Through producing! By digging for the most compelling storylines, creating situations through casting and filming that will make the nuances of those storylines shine through. To produce is to influence. Why do you think Alexis Bellino was brought back into the fold after she started dating Shannon Beador’s ex? Because that is a storyline.

 

As for what happens next, no one’s got the answer, not even Bravo. And I think that’s the real issue. Bravo is easily the world’s largest manufacturer of reality TV. And had they not been so pre-occupied with the threat of unionization and fighting lawsuits like this were a game of dodgeball, they might’ve found the time to sit down and come up with a strategy to last longer than a season, rather than the patchwork we saw them do with this latest reunion, and truly get the game back in their control. 

Photo credits: Twitter/ Bravo

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