"Jersey Couture" gives yet another depiction of the state as a place peopled only by Italian-Americans who won’t remind you of Mario Cuomo. What was the mission statement for this series? It is easy to imagine something like: "Deliver consistent shots of cleavage and pizza in a two-to-one ratio"

"Jersey Couture" is set in Diane & Company, a clothing store in Freehold. It specializes in party dresses, with parties being more like proms, Sweet 16s, and weddings with statuary.

Kimberly says. "I’m going to tell you if you’ve got back fat. You don’t want to walk into your affair, and your back fat’s hanging out."

The New Jersey of "Jersey Couture," a new reality series beginning Tuesday on Oxygen, is not the New Jersey of Princeton University or the Pine Valley Golf Club, just in case you were wondering. And weren’t you wondering just a little, because really, how much meatballs-and-McMansion generalizing can one small mid-Atlantic state endure?
Having observed "Jersey Shore" on MTV and "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" on Bravo, apparently with a stenographer’s pad, the creators of "Jersey Couture" were not inspired to try thematic counterprogramming. ("Forget Jacuzzis! Let’s put hidden cameras in Trenton budget meetings!") Instead we are given yet another depiction of the state as a place peopled only by Italian-Americans who won’t remind you of Mario Cuomo. What was the mission statement for this series? It is easy to imagine something like: “Deliver consistent shots of cleavage and pizza in a two-to-one ratio."
As it happens, opportunities for cleavage abound. "Jersey Couture" is set in Diane & Company, a clothing store in Freehold. It specializes in party dresses, though using that phrase is out of step with the vernacular. In the reality-television world of New Jersey (or, rather, Jersey) parties are never parties; they are invariably affairs.
Affairs are proms, Sweet 16s, weddings with statuary: events in which a chilling shame should theoretically take over anyone showing up in something not quite Bob Mackie enough. Diane & Company is owned by the Scali family. Day-to-day operations are overseen by the matriarch, Diane, and her daughters, Kimberly and Christina, and they would probably tell you that Diana, Princess of Wales, was underdressed for her wedding. Like nearly everyone else populating the fictional New Jersey of cable television, these women don’t just tell it like it is, they tell you how they tell it like it is.
“You got back fat?" Kimberly asks. "I’m going to tell you if you’ve got back fat. You don’t want to walk into your affair, and your back fat’s hanging out."
The Scalis don’t live as large as the women on "The Real Housewives of New Jersey," so the series denies you the only pleasure it could possibly offer: the comforting sense of imperiousness you feel at the specter of rich people too dopey and tasteless to deserve their money. There are no 52-inch flat-screen televisions popping out of bed frames so far, and what passes for tension among the Scalis is the issue of Christina’s wish for more distance from her family. She is in her 20s and has just moved into her own apartment. We are meant to take this as a gesture of rebellion because the stereotyping doesn’t bypass the notion that Italian-American families care little for filial independence. They don’t want boundaries; they want to live all metaphorically on top of one another, as if life were one big Olive Garden commercial.
Clichés with this kind of thud land regularly on "Downtown Girls," a new reality series set in Lower Manhattan, also beginning on Tuesday. This one is from MTV and rips off "The City" which ripped off "The Hills"  which inverted the "Sex and the City" idea that female friendship is inviolable and instead pitted sister against sister, implant against implant. 
“Downtown Girls" doesn’t go that far - it doesn’t really go anywhere. Like "The Hills" and "The City"  it presents a group of 20-something friends struggling toward urbanity: a blogger, an aspiring lawyer, a bride to be and so on. They look for men and complain about them. They try pole dancing as physical fitness. They decide maybe to trades exes. Someone called Shallon is hung up on a younger guy who lives with his parents in Jersey (yup, Jersey). She asks rhetorical questions as she looks intently at her laptop. Cue Carrie Bradshaw - but not the heart, the wardrobe, the spark or the fun.
JERSEY COUTURE:  Oxygen, Tuesday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/arts/television/01jersey.html
 

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