Jersey Shore

When I first heard of this show I thought it would make me glad I’m Sicilian instead of Italian and not from New Jersey. The focus of the controversy behind the show was how bad it made Italians look by reinforcing stereotypes instead of trying to reduce them. However, I found that while watching I never really felt like the people involved were representative of a culture. The most that I believe could be said of the cast members is that they are specimen of a subculture; merely examples of a group of people who have latched onto their fashion and things they’ve seen in Goodfellas as representations of their culture. Watching them with their modified and overly made up bodies didn’t feel like watching actual people. I felt like I was watching cartoon characters because they are merely caricatures of themselves. The same thing happens whenever I watch a MTV produced bit of entertainment. They’ve built an empire on sociological experiments in which little if not nothing is learned.
Entertainment is the sole purpose, and at least in my case it was a success. I laughed, I cried, but I only cried because I was laughing so hard. Most of the time I wasn’t even laughing at the cast because they were ridiculous, but because they were genuinely hilarious. Something about obsessively manicured eyebrows makes their facial expressions that much more effective. The casts’ interactions were highly entertaining and I’m quite a sucker for verbal wittiness. Or as was more often the case, an amusing lack of wittiness. The things they said were often predictable, as in when Vinny contracted pink eye I just knew that someone was going to say 'That's like, a disease!' and I was right. Just watching them do their thing was rather fascinating, like a national geographic show about overly tanned people and their confused fashion choices. About their fashion though, I can’t say it’s for me personally but they all managed to look good in even the most questionable clothes. Maybe their clothes just fit their personalities so well it was easy to overlook the less flattering choices. The beach house and its combination of drunken inhabitants and way too many staircases is a joke in itself in each episode. I've not been to a beach house where I didn't drink and which didn't have at least four long staircases. Needless to say, every time I've been in a beach house someone has fallen down some stairs. Who is in charge of designing these things?

Sometimes though, I laughed because they were ridiculous. How can you not laugh at a guy whose nickname is ‘The Situation’, and refers to himself in the third person solely as such while talking about the situations he finds himself in? That makes for comic gold. If MTV didn’t add in those helpful name tag cues in the ‘confessional’ parts of the show I would never have known his name was Mike. Another stand out among the men of the cast was Pauly whose facial expressions and drunken philosophizing were consistent sources of humor. My favorite person by far was Snooki for being such an entertaining and adorable little creature. She brought so much to the show: 'the party', her poof, her habit of catching rides on other taller people, her pickle habit, and the funny noises she makes. I felt like there wasn’t enough of her in the show. While the others were doing whatever they were doing I would just hope that she would come back onscreen and give me a reason to laugh. Also, honorable mention goes to JWoww’s placenta looking hair/weave and Dr. Girlfriend voice, and Ronnie for being (as far as I could tell) the most intelligent member of the cast. Well except for that one time he put charcoal on the gas grill and almost blew the house up. Wait, was that him? I had a hard time telling everyone apart. And I can’t end this paragraph without mentioning the inexplicable duck phone that no one can seemed to operate. It had character.

Of course, as with The Real World, casting for this show managed to find the most outrageous personalities available to put in this house together. The house itself is decorated almost exclusively with green, white, red, gold, and Scarface posters. For the privilege of staying in the house the cast has to work in the Shore Shop, a T-shirt store nearby run by the poor guy that owns the house. Somehow, this is a strain for some members of the house while others’ sole sales strategy is incessant flirting. Other screen time is split between the guys ‘so manly it’s homoerotic’ working out/tanning/hairstyling and the casts partying at the house, bars, and clubs. The nights’ activities, of course, revolve around alcohol with a comical focus on the fact that there’s a hot tub at the house. For instance, every situation ‘The Situation’ devises to hook up with women he meets hinges on (and is sometimes thwarted by) the hot tub. Due to the consumption of moderate to large quantities of alcohol and a lack of communication, there are a fair amount of arguments in the show. The overblown personalities involved as well as the tendency of camera crews to draw attention led to a few fights.

I found the show to be surprisingly violent. Not that I care about violence on TV, but it just didn’t occur to me that there would be many physical fights in a show about being at the beach. I suppose steroid addled brains and loud mouths cause a lot more fights than I realized. I was actually relieved that in a rare case of discretion MTV decided to replace the clip of a large muscle bound man punching a tiny Snooki straight in the face with black screen and a public service announcement. I had already seen it plenty of times in previous episodes’ teasers and I think that seeing it in context would have been even more jarring. Though it was surely the worst hit of the show I wondered why the fights in all the other episodes were OK. Surely this one bit of violence against women wasn’t the only example of such misogynism in the show, but merely the most glaring example. Was it because it was so one-sided? Alas, after a bit of research I had to conclude that it was just because of the sponsors threatening to take their money back.

Overall, this show gave me a look into a subculture that I was aware of, but was thoroughly foreign to me. I found that the only group of people the cast manages to make look bad are themselves. Maybe I had really low expectations for this show, but I found it a little addictive and probably a little too entertaining. I also found that while it did make me feel less intelligent, its effects were temporary. I can now consider this show mostly harmless and safe for human consumption. Of course this barely covers the exceedingly awful awesomeness of this show. For more in depth recaps (or if you’d rather read about the show than watch it) go here, to fourfour, and have the amazing Rich treat you to the best gifs in town. Go for the recaps, stay for everything else that is fringe pop culture and adorable cats.