It’s a chilly Friday night at Pearl in downtown San Jose, and because of the usual politics of club entrances, my photographer and I are being held back in the doorway by a stern but friendly bouncer, as tube dress after tube dress skips past us into the glowing blue bosom of the raucous dance floor.
After he hears that we’re there because Ronnie Magro, a cast member of MTV’s wildly popular reality TV series Jersey Shore, is making a San Jose appearance, an onlooker grumbles something to the effect of “Why is that guy even famous?” Fair question. And one I’ve heard repeatedly since the show netted 4.8 million viewers during the season finale—and since I’ve become its No. 1 fan.
I. Love. Jersey. Shore. Unironically and wholeheartedly. And after I made the mistake of pretend-exploding my brains after a co-worker confessed he didn’t know what the show was, I was saddled with the dubious task of trying to explain why I think the show is so special.
Now, for the uninitiated, Jersey Shore is a reality television series that follows eight housemates for one summer while they share what is known as a “shore house” in the beach town of Seaside Heights.
If this sounds like Real World, the granddaddy of modern reality television, it isn’t. While the Real World casts have profiles scrubbed as shiny as graduate school applications, Jersey Shore has taken a slightly different tack. MTV brought together four loud guys and four louder girls, all from the northeast, all a little worse for wear after years of hard partying, and all unabashedly “guido”—the politically incorrect term for a young person of not necessarily Italian descent that has picked up the modern and more colorful attributes of “representing family, friends, tannin’, gel, everything,” according to cast member Pauly D, who sports a breathtaking example of another “guido” attribute—the blow-out hairstyle. There’s no token black guy or gay boy. It’s all guidos, all the time.
What ensues is no less than glorious chaos. The boys brawl, the girls brawl, they hook up, they strike out, they party way too hard and wake up not necessarily knowing exactly what their camera crew has captured. So some of the appeal is obvious—it’s a trainwreck. But I realized there’s more to it than that when I felt my heart actually begin to race during a fight on episode six, “Boardwalk Blowups.”
The New Yorker‘s television column attempted to explain Jersey Shore this way: “It can give itself a pat on the back for enabling viewers to feel superior to at least eight other people.” And here I must humbly disagree. The times I’ve seen The Bachelor or The Hills, I have absolutely found my ego swelling to tremendous size. But Jersey Shore makes me feel like Diane Fossey. I have no more in common with these guidos than with a band of orangutans, so I can’t feel superior to them. Rather, I’m content to observe.
MTV achieved something special with this cast. This is a collection of young people obsessed with image and with being able to fight and fuck like the best of ’em, but they’re also pretty clueless (except Pauly D, who at 29 is a little more prepped for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune).
When an overly confident cast member nicknamed The Situation loses out on Sammi Sweetheart, the disappointment practically drips down his bulbous nose. When Snooki get shut down time after time by club meatheads, or when Ronnie is provoked into yet another tiff with Sammi, it’s pretty honest television.
And there’s something else. What happened in Season 1 happens in shore houses all over New Jersey every single summer. It’s not normal for seven irritatingly beautiful strangers to live in an opulent but ugly house together; it’s not normal to compete in a Hollywood mansion for the affections of a C-rate rock star; but it’s not an accident that Ronnie can find someone to fist fight him around every corner, or that the Situation can find a handful of second-rate sluts to take home every night—this is the friggin Jersey Shore.
Now, I don’t want to go overboard here. I realized after the season finale that I don’t know much about the cast. (Are they students? Do they have jobs?). But the show does a pretty good job of crystallizing a moment in time, a time of Ed Hardy hats, bedazzled tees and binge drinking the summer away. And I’m glad I could witness it from 3,000 miles away.
Now, in some ways, I’ve sort of missed the boat here. Jersey Shore’s first season has already ended, and the gaggle of cast members have become household names. This becomes clear at Pearl, where my hopes of actually talking to Ronnie are dashed when I see that he’s been cordoned off in a VIP area of the dance floor and guarded by 6’6″ 300-pound mixed martial arts fighter Marcus “The Monster” Royster.
Ronnie’s shorter than I thought he’d be and not nearly as swollen-looking as he appeared on-camera, but that hasn’t stopped about 100 girls in 4-inch heels from lining up to have their photo taken with him before they hastily clop offstage.
Instead, I watch from the sidelines as he poses for photo after photo, not talking to anyone, and every 10th photo stopping to take a sip of something the color of Red Bull. There’s no fist pumping, there’s no fist fighting. He looks sort of like a caged animal.
And that sums up why I’ll probably not be watching Season 2. Who cares if Pauly D or the Situation score anymore? They’re famous. Second, they’re moving Jersey Shore from the Jersey Shore, assured that the cast’s personality transcends location, which I’ll bet it doesn’t. I would argue that they need a new cast of sun-damaged ingénues to populate the shore house and let Season 1 have their own show called something else. But keep Jersey Shore at the Jersey Shore.
Finally, I’ll wrap with a futile plea. Don’t make them over. Please. Leave Snooki alone, Inside Edition. Don’t teach her the secrets of invisible makeup. Don’t give J-WOWW the deep conditioning treatment her hair desperately needs. These people are fan-trash-tic living in their blown-out bubble. Don’t contaminate my field of study.
