Though reports of a total reboot seem greatly exaggerated, The Real Housewives of New Jersey will likely look different in Season 15 — and fans will likely be waiting a while to see those changes.
One source told DailyMail.com this week that filming for RHONJ “will likely not resume until 2025.”
The source said: “There are not going to be any decisions about what will or won’t happen with the show until early next year. There is not going to be any more filming of RHONJ for the remainder of the year. There’s nothing planned. It’s on ice.”
The 14th season of the Bravo reality show was a frustrating one for fans, with the cast divided into two camps amid a major rift between sisters-in-law Melissa Gorga and Teresa Giudice. That on-set rancor led Bravo to call off Season 14’s post-finale cast reunion.
However, claims that the network has already fired some of the Jersey housewives are “not true,” the source told DailyMail.com, adding that the network isn’t “rushing into” Season 15 casting. “However, there are some cast members [who] are less likely to come back than others based on certain events that have unfolded this past season,” the source explained. “For two or three cast members, it could be over for good. … [Bravo is] always looking for new talent to bring in higher ratings.”
So why delay Season 15? “I think that they don’t know what to do,” the source speculated. “They don’t know what to do because it’s almost like a puzzle where you’re trying to put pieces together that make sense. And there’s very few pieces of this puzzle that make sense for viewers right now.”
A second source told DailyMail.com that Real Housewives executive producer Andy Cohen is “not ruling anything out” about how or even if RHONJ returns. “It can be a cast shakeup with only some cast members coming back, it can be rebooted, or RHONJ can be cancelled altogether — nothing is off the table,” that source said.
Cohen, for his part, told a disgruntled RHONJ fan who called into his SiriusXM radio show that he and the other producers are “gonna reboot it” and “gonna do something different” with “maybe just all fresh faces,” per Entertainment Weekly.
After those comments went viral, Cohen clarified that he was “just riffing” and “not definitively saying it’s going to be all fresh faces,” but he added that producers “are going to reimagine the show in some way,” per Page Six.
The RHONJ cast — for now, at least — includes Giudice, Gorga, Jennifer Aydin, Dolores Catania, Margaret Josephs, Danielle Cabral, and Rachel Fuda, plus friends Jackie Goldschneider and Jennifer Fessler.