After it was recently announced that The Real Housewives of New Jersey would not have a traditional finale for season 14, fans have been guessing what a change to tradition means for the long-running reality series.
The show, which premiered in 2009, has been faced with an increasingly fraught core cast of friends – extending to estranged family members like Melissa Gorga and Teresa Giudice – making production much more difficult, especially getting all the cast in one room together.
Recent speculation has claimed that the series is getting a makeover, with some new faces taking the places of well-known cast members. It’s not the first time The Real Housewives franchise has fired an entire cast, and Andy Cohen is now commenting on what the future of the series will look like.
What did Andy Cohen say about the next season of The Real Housewives of New Jersey?
On his Andy Cohen Live show on SiriusXM, the TV host and Bravo figurehead discussed the latest season of RHONJ with a listener, who complained about a downgrade in quality in more recent episodes. “Have you heard that we’re gonna do big changes to the show?”, Cohen replied.
“We’re gonna reboot [RHONJ]. We’re gonna do something different,” he continued. For most television shows, a reboot implies an entire reset to a new storyline – with an all new cast too. When it came to the specifics of what a RHONJ revamp would look like – and to the extent of how different it would be – Cohen was a little more vague.
“We’re gonna see what we do. We’ll see. I don’t know. Maybe just all fresh faces.”
Melissa Gorga, a main cast member since RHONJ’s third season, seemed enthusiastic about the shake-up. “Listen, I’m excited for what’s to come. I think we are due for some type of change,” Gorga told Page Six.
It wouldn’t be the first time The Real Housewives has rebooted an entire cast
In October 2023, an investigative piece by Vanity Fair detailed incidents of racism and discrimination that took place on the Real Housewives of New York set between 2020 and 2021. The piece reported that Ramona Singer, an alum of the first thirteen seasons of the show, had used the N-word on set while speaking to Darian Edmondson, a Black producer for the series, as well as using slurs against Catholics and Jewish people.
According to Eboni K. Williams, the first black housewife to feature as a main cast member on RHONY, Singer had also invoked a stereotype about black people not having fathers, resulting in the then-housewife, as well as several others, having to attend a virtual “education session” for diversity and inclusion. Williams also walked off set after what she reported were a series of microaggressions from co-star Luanne de Lesseps, in which she was called “an angry woman”. Her walk-off prompted Singer to retort that this was why they shouldn’t “hire black people”.
When asked about the allegations from Vanity Fair by Page Six, Singer began to spell out the first few letters of N-word to a reporter for the outlet when quoting what she allegedly said, which did nothing to quash the allegations of racism made against her.
The on-set issues over racism were said to have influenced the Bravo network’s decision to drop cast members in 2022, before the Vanity Report was published, alongside criticism from viewers over microaggressions that were shown on-screen during the airing of season thirteen. For the fourteenth season of the reality series, the entire cast had been let go in favor of a full-scale reboot.
The RHONY reboot has been pretty successful – although fans may miss the old cast members that made the series such a long-running franchise. Newer faces to the series, such as Jenna Lyons and Brynn Whitfield, have continued to captivate viewers despite the change to storylines.
So, are the rumors true after all?
It is confirmed that some very big changes are coming to The Real Housewives of New Jersey – at least, according to Andy Cohen, who said in June that there were no plans to reboot the cast for season 15. However, what a major reboot may actually look like is unclear – and it seems maybe Cohen himself isn’t sure, either.
The series should at least, to some extent, add some fresh faces, which is very much a requirement if the show seeks to create new storylines and spice up the now-15-year-old series format. In a softer reboot, the show may drop some of the less popular cast members, but a big announcement seems to imply something much more radical.
However, as shown by Melissa Gorga’s excitement over a series shake-up, as shown above, perhaps some of the cast will keep their jobs after the reboot after all. However, the reality star did admit that she doesn’t know what a rebooted series would entail, responding “my guess is as good as yours” when asked by Page Six about the details.