Connections

I spent yesterday obsessing over the Real Housewives of New Jersey. This is not a recap - this, my friends, is research.

For those of you who haven't looked into it yet, here's a summary of the players:

• Caroline and Dina are sisters
• Albert and Tommy are brothers
• Caroline is married to Albert.
• Dina is married to Tommy
• Jacqueline is married to the brother of Caroline and Dina
• Danielle is a girlfriend of Jacqueline
• Teresa is unrelated to anyone else here.

Tommy and Albert own a well-known banquet hall called the Brownstone House in Paterson, NJ. It sounds classy but it's your basic overdone wedding place decorated like an Italian funeral parlor. I was there for a wedding once 20 years ago and remember the food as being  very good quality and abundant. however, the place does not fare well in the user reviews,  mostly due to crass behavior of the people in charge. Dina, by the way, is an interior decorator/event planner whose office is located in the Brownstone House.

Now here's where it gets interesting - the is not the first reality TV appearance for Dina/Tommy and Caroline/Albert. VH1 has a series called My Big Fat Fabulous Wedding which featured  Dina and Tommy's $1,150,000.00 wedding.

Tommy's a jerk who cheated on Dina many times before committing to the wedding then invited 200 extra people during the week before it took place. At the reception, he left the bride alone while he went into the kitchen to boss the wait staff around. In the video clips at the VH1 site, you can see the extra old men parked around the offices engaged in man-banter as if it were kind of  a social club, a situation which accounted for a lot of the user complaints about dealing with this place. So now we know what we're dealing with here - what a pity only he won't appear on RHoNJ.

Other elements of this series include construction companies, stage mothering, strip clubs, the fashion business, post-divorce rancor, infertility, phone sex and daily blow jobs. And that was just the preview of the first full episode on May 12th!

This show is going to be so great that it will wipe all the rest of the Housewives franchise right out off the map.