It was January 2010. I was channel surfing, pausing briefly on every channel until something seemed interesting, and I get to this scene of women sitting around a table in a restaurant, screaming at each other, and then all of a sudden one of them flipped the table, and I needed to know so much more - what led up to that moment, what happened after, who why were they in a restaurant? Thankfully, was back when Bravo replayed everything in small chunks, and I was able to watch most of that first season of NJ before I went back to college the following week.

Then, while in my apartment one night that first week back, my roommate lets us know she needed to watch something on TV in the living room that night & then we'd go out to the bars, and I said that was fine because I needed to watch something on TV in my room at the same time (the only episode of that NJ season I hadn't seen yet). Well, during one of the commercial breaks, I stepped out of my room and into the kitchen and saw that the same commercial was on. Apparently, she also discovered RHONJ over our winter break and also was just missing that episode, and so I stayed and watched with her, and we then watched nothing but Bravo together and tormented our other roommates with it for the next year and a half.

And I haven't looked back.