Metacritic TV

The Real Housewives of New Jersey

SERIES: Bravo, Tuesday 11:00p (60 minutes)

Created by Rebecca Toth Diefenbach, Valerie Haselton, Nina L. Diaz, and Lucille D'Agostino

Genre(s): Reality (Non-Competitive)

FIRST AIR DATE: May 12, 2009

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

63 / 100

Critic Reviews

83 Entertainment Weekly Ken Tucker
On its lacquered surface, New Jersey is The Sopranos with five variations on Adriana. But dig a bit under these women’s verbal clichés and you glimpse lives that are rooted in an earthier, more clear-eyed view of the world than the other Housewives series.
80 New York Daily News David Hinckley
Tuesday night’s premiere packs a lot of trash into 42 minutes, between the quips about “jewelry whores” and an almost pathological concern with whose “bubbies” are and aren’t authentic. It plants the first seeds of drama, too.
80 The New York Times Alessandra Stanley
Housewives of New Jersey is more farcical, less phony and a lot more fun.
80 Boston Globe Joanna Weiss
Their lack of self-awareness is intoxicating; it makes the premiere the most engrossing hour of pure TV escapism I've seen in a very long time.
80 Washington Post Tom Shales
Whatever else it is, the show is supremely entertaining. Smartly edited and cleverly constructed--the George Washington Bridge serving as a visual transition--the series marks another auspicious entry to television's vast stockpile of Guilty Pleasures.
70 Variety Brian Lowry
Playing to the cameras, even many elements that feel slightly staged (including convenient intra-housewife feuding) prove nearly irresistible, again reminding us that horrible people you'd never want to associate with are often the spice of reality. This show puts the Bada-Bing in Bravo.
58 Newsday Valerie Kellogg
If you thought the "Real Housewives" of New York City, Atlanta and Orange County were outrageous, you haven't seen anything yet.
30 Philadelphia Inquirer Jonathan Storm
Appalling or phony--one conclusion must be true, and either one underscores the fundamental question about these Real Housewives shows: Why would anyone want to watch them?
30 Slate Troy Patterson
When I say that The RH of NJ is the most synthetic installment of the show yet produced.
30 Wall Street Journal Nancy DeWolf Smith
Suffice it to say that Bravo has found yet another group of not-very-appealing women to represent their gender and, more broadly speaking, the lifestyle of the heterosexual cheeseball.

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