It’s been many, many years since I gave a summary The Real Housewives of New Jersey, there’s something you need to know about me before we begin: I hate Teresa Giudice with the burning passion of a million billion suns. Sorry, there is no room here for Tre hugs, because there is a deep aversion to her being thrown deep out of my soul. I do not like to hate her, just like with Jennifer Aydin, who I find disturbing in group interactions, but endearing with her family. I hate it to hate her. I hate her so much that I think she should get off my television screen.
I appreciate everything she has done for the Real Housewives franchise, and I think she is an excellent practitioner in reality television art and science. But I think her time should have passed once her storyline started, you know, committing real crimes for which she went to jail and then passively benefited by continuing the storyline in a reality show and writing a book about everything while showing just as little remorse as there is a market for her Fabulinis, i.e. nothing. That said, I will try to bring fair and balanced reactions to her this season, but, Tre and I, are not starting well. However, the show starts off excellent.
It all starts at the party for Jackie’s husband, Evan, 173 medium-rare steaks packed in the body of a Greek god. This is the first big event of a post-COVID summer, and everyone is ready to put on real clothes, get out of the house and show all the plastic surgery they had while the cameras were off and they had plenty of time had to heal. Margaret had her breasts done, and it looks amazing, but not as good as her face, which looks slightly tighter around the lips, but completely refreshed and rejuvenated. Is it an operation or just a time off?
Dolores underwent most surgeries. She said, “I had a little tummy ache, liposuction and a little bump.” Does she mean it just lifted a little, or does she just want us to think it’s not a big deal? An elevator is also not something you can have just like Botox or tiramisu. We saw the scars; it seems like a real deal. Her ex, Frank, tells her it looks like she’s been filtered like a flounder. “Well, my butt shone,” she says. Gold star for Dolores.
Her boyfriend, David, did not love the surgery, and he is a doctor. She first told him this before she went to the hospital because he thinks choice questions are wrong. Oh yeah, we got a hell of an update from David and Dolores. So she never moved into the house the two of them had built together, which is the most beautiful Pottery Barn showroom – with tasteful soft sofas and strange yacht lights in the corners – that I had never seen before. She still lives with her ex-husband, Frank, while her son, Frankie, lives with David.
I like a modern arrangement, so I think it’s just wonderful and much more sophisticated than anyone who’s actually in this strange family outing situation. But I’m at Dodo; If he does not want to take things to the next level, then who is it to tell her how to live her life? “What I like about our relationship is that I have the freedom to do what I want and that I do not demand the dedication I thought I needed,” she says. Bake it in your ziti and call the Brownstone because we need a celebration.
Anyway, everyone shows up at Evan’s party with their new tits and asses and faces. Jackie hired a party planner for this event, which seems odd because it’s under a tent in a restaurant parking lot. I know, COVID restrictions suck. But I could tell you how to pitch a tent in a parking lot, and the restaurant is there. Let them just make provision for that. How much more planning do you need to do? A bartender? Let Frankie just hire three of his friends from the gym. Bada-bing, we have an amateur strip club for Evan’s birthday. Just what he wanted.
What he did not want was that Teresa went around at his own 46th birthday party and talked shit about him. Well, he also does not want fat, out-of-shape kids, and he’s going to make them squat and make lungs while holding wooden stumps over their heads, which looks like something that would be piled up in a Charles Dickens novel. While Jackie is giving her speech on how much she loves him, Teresa says to Melissa, “I heard Evan do things?” Melissa is confused. What kind of stuff? Teresa tells her that she heard he “does things in the gym.” Okay, yeah, what kind of stuff are we talking about? Butt good? Double Stuf? Bly-Puft Marshmallow Man stuff? Talk about rubbing salt in my wounds – d’oh! I do not know if you’ve ever been in a men’s dressing room, but … yes. Teresa says she heard Evan “cheat” her in the gym. She can not remember who told her, because: “You know me, I just forget things.”
Teresa then tells everyone in the cast that she heard an unspecified rumor from an unidentified source that Evan is doing unverified things with mysterious people who are not his wife in an alternate dimension, known as the Champion Gym in Tenafly, New Joisey. Everyone, for some, even Jackie’s sworn enemy, Jennifer, thinks it’s disgusting. It’s so rough that Margaret’s husband, Joe Benigno, is sitting next to a trash can at the end of the night. Oh no, wait. These were the kamikaze shots. The only thing more College Night at Ruby Tuesday than doing kamikaze shots is sliding them through the trash again.
Jackie finds out, and before all the girls go for a long weekend on Lake George, she wants to talk to Teresa about what she said. They decide to gather at Margaret Joseph’s House of Maximalist Wonder, where everything is psychedelic print velvet furniture in front of green crocodile wallpaper from a hallway covered with Missoni prints and the taxidermy trophies of rare animals. Since she’s a lawyer, as she will always remind you, Jackie has a calm and rational argument for Teresa. She says Teresa shared a rumor on camera that could have devastating consequences for her and her family. ‘You have to admit that whoever told you that does not know me and Evan, does not know what they are talking about. You have to admit that it’s a lie, ‘Jackie pleads with Teresa, an immobile for whom a person with a JD has had to settle for the past three seasons.
One of Teresa’s many fatal flaws is that she cannot admit that she is wrong. She would not say, ‘I’m sorry. Yes, I heard it, but I do not believe it and I think it’s false. “No, she has to double down and say, ‘Well, that’s not what I said. him at his party. “All right, yes. Point taken, but even worse, you talked about him behind all his friends.
I would like to dismantle every point in Teresa’s argument because it’s absolutely ridiculous. She will not tell Jackie who told her this rumor, possibly because she does not remember and possibly because she made it up herself, or possibly because she is trying to protect someone. I think it’s a combination of these three and the person she’s trying to protect is Teresa Giudice. Jackie asks if that person knows her and Evan. “I’m not sure,” Teresa said. “Obviously they do when they tell me.” The question is whether this person actually knows them as a couple or just knows who they are because the person saw them on a very popular TV show? Teresa can not say.
Then Teresa says, “Where there is smoke, there is fire.” Yes, that’s often true, but Teresa did not see the smoke or the fire. She poured gasoline over the whole situation, threw a lit Zippo into it, watched it explode and then said, “Hey everyone, look at this smoke!”
Her next argument is that, now that she’s alone, a lot of married guys have hit her and wanted affairs. Okay, was Evan one of those people? No? Then this point does not even make sense. We know that many married men have affairs. I do not know, look at the behavior of your ex-husband on camera.
After Jackie says she’s a smart woman and knows Teresa’s lying, Teresa says, ‘If you’re a smart girl and you know he’s not cheating, you need to get yourself on your toes. Um, hello! What do you think she’s doing in this room ?!
Jackie accuses Teresa of spreading a rumor, and she says, ‘I did not spread a rumor. I heard a rumor. “Yes, you heard a rumor and then did not just go, ‘Oh, that’s crazy.’ You did not, as Jennifer says, collect and get receipts. You just started telling people at a party. If you smeared a melting Magnum bar on all the people, someone would say that you spread ice cream (delicious, chocolate-covered ice cream) all over the party. Now just imagine that this Magnum is a rumor. Yes, you are spreading it as if I will spread my legs after this pandemic is over.
Finally, Jackie tries to use logic with Teresa. It will never work. Trying to extract logic from Teresa is like asking a starfish to borrow a pen. Teresa does not understand reason or hypocrisy. She can not process that she was hurt when Kim D. spread rumors about her so that Jackie could also feel in a similar situation. Teresa, like a wounded dog, knows nothing but what she is feeling at that moment and reacts to it, often in malicious ways. Jackie makes this mistake over and over again and tries to argue with Teresa as if she is a person of average intelligence. Well, if Teresa made up this rumor and would not tell her how she heard it and whether it was true, it’s the same as what Jackie said, ‘I heard Gia cook in the bathrooms during parties.’
This is when things really go sideways and Teresa Margaret’s collection of multicolored funhouse mirrors leaves and the word screams kut in her aftermath as if it were Princess Diana’s train during her wedding. All because Jackie “brought kids in here.”
That’s not what Jackie did. Jackie makes the intellectual point that Teresa is inventing something and says it’s on camera to hurt Jackie, just like Jackie invents this thing about Gia. In the context of the argument, we should all know that this ‘rumor’ is false. That’s the point. Jackie does not claim that Gia does cook; she claims that Teresa came up with a rumor to slander her. Teresa will never understand this analogy, because she’s basically a stain of half – chilled Hubba Bubba walking around on human legs.
That’s why I’m so sick of Teresa in this program. All the villains, all the people we hate – the Kenyan Moores, the Ramona Singers, the Jen Shahs – they reason about things because they are stray narcissists who can see no other point. I find it at least clinically interesting. However, Teresa is stupid in the garden, and it bores me.
The best part of the episode happens just before Teresa arrives, when Jackie tells Margaret that Teresa spread lies and physically assaulted people and that Danielle assaulted Margaret last year just because Teresa told her to. Jackie’s other points are supported by archival footage from Teresa making up lies about Melissa as a stripper, hitting Andy Cohen and throwing a wine glass, along with the infamous tablecloth. Jackie asks, “How far do we let a person like Teresa go?” I think it’s not just a question for the women, the production company they hire, and Bravo, but also for us as viewers. Apparently the answer is at least another season, but I wish something changed that.