NJ.com, 7-Jan-15
By Vicki Hyman
Donnie Wahlberg and Jenny McCarthy seem like a relatively well-adjusted, down-to-earth couple who are genuinely in love — lovely for them, but that doesn't make the most compelling reality show, at least for viewers who prefer trainwrecks a la "Britney and Kevin: Chaotic" or "Being Bobby Brown."
The couple met in 2013 as guests on Bravo's "Watch What Happens," got engaged in 2014 and married in August outside McCarthy's hometown of Chicago, and the wedding serves as the appetizer for their new reality series, "Donnie Loves Jenny," which premieres Wednesday night at 10 p.m. on A&E.
The couple now make Weehawken their home — Wahlberg shoots the police drama "Blue Bloods" in New York, and McCarthy co-hosted "The View" from the Big Apple until being unceremoniously dumped last year — and they share their large but not over-the-top townhouse with McCarthy's 12-year-old son Evan and her father Macky.
Wahlberg and McCarthy are producing the show along with 44 Blue Productions, which produces the other Wahlberg family reality show "Wahlburgers," also on A&E, about Donnie and Mark Wahlberg's brother Paul's burger joint.
The hour-long premiere is, obviously, heavy on the wedding prep, with Wahlberg tasked with transporting McCarthy's wedding gown from New Jersey to Illinois (as if), and special appearances by the rest of New Kids on the Block but sadly no impromptu reprise of "Hangin' Tough." (Wahlberg's brother, the performer previously known as Marky Mark, could not attend due to his daughter's birthday).
The episode establishes the couple's chemistry nicely as well as McCarthy's clearly close, caring relationship with Evan, who has autism, but it never mawkishly lingers on his diagnosis. As you might expect from a wedding episode, it is a bit on the shmaltzy side, although I admit I nodded in agreement when Jenny's mother Linda likened finding her true love this way: "It was like walking in stilettos, then putting on a pair of slippers." McCarthy: "I feel I've found my slippers." Aw.
Snippets from the rest of the season suggest much more wackiness (and a bit more lewdness) to come, with the couple teaching Evan about the birds and the bees, giving Macky a disastrous facial before a date, and accidentally setting the bedroom linens on fire during a moment of intimacy ... or as intimate as it can get with a cameraman, a producer and a couple of production assistants in the room.
