Revisiting Jersey Shore

In my sophomore year of college, I took a blow-off TV analysis class where we had to write an extensive paper on a show of our choosing. I, thinking I was being funny, chose Jersey Shore. No sooner did I commit to this bit that I realized I had to actually watch all of Jersey Shore in a fairly condensed time period, so I purchased the first four seasons on DVD and somehow managed to watch all of them in the span of a week or two. Later that year, that professor assigned us an article he wrote criticizing the portrayal of Italian Americans in The Sopranos. He was not amused.

As far as reality trash goes, I was pretty fond of it. Though I hit a point of diminishing returns in the back half of season three and into season four, it was entertaining, funny, and provided good fodder for group watches and drinking games. Yes, it’s dumb reality TV, but as someone who would happily take dumb reality TV over the vast majority of straight-down-the-middle multi-cam sitcoms, I don’t see that as a bad thing. Unlike those sitcoms, dumb reality TV is actually interesting.

In recent weeks, I’ve felt the need to watch something goofy. Part of it is the times. Part of it is that I’ve been watching a lot of reputable movies in my free time and I needed something disreputable for the sake of balance. I scrolled through Hulu, I saw that it had Jersey Shore, I giggled, and then I started my rewatch.

As of writing this, I just finished season four. I’m at the exact point I was when I wrote that paper. I think I’m going to keep going, though admittedly curiosity is pulling me forward more than actual entertainment. But let’s focus on the substance. What have I learned from returning to this show now that I’m in my 30s?

I Have More Respect For Jersey Shore in a Post Housewives World

There is a narrative structure a lot of the big reality shows use that I fundamentally cannot stand.

The structure is something like this: We get a little bit of time with a cast member, and then we either get a big moment of drama or a teasing of future drama, and then we cut to another cast member’s chiron and card before we spend a bunch of time with them. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

My problem with this approach is that I think it diminishes the sense of narrative. It’s the illusion of storytelling without the structure, and a lot of the time, it feels like you’re watching a trailer as opposed to a story. Even when it doesn’t, it still feels like the show stretching a storyline past its breaking point. I know that I cited Housewives, but the most egregious offender is the episodes of 90 Day Fiancé I’ve been forced to watch over the years. The episodes feel like they’re a million years long, and before anything interesting happens with a particular cast member, it cuts away to someone else. You’ll have to keep chasing the carrot and watching to get to the juicy stuff. 

To be fair, Jersey Shore does a very similar trick. There are little cue cards that sum up the section of the show you’re about to watch. The difference, however, is that they’re not organized by character, but rather a plot, theme, or location, which is to say nothing of the fact that you’ll miss these cues if you blink. It’s not storyline to storyline. It’s chapter to chapter.

Jersey Shore more or less follows the traditional rules of storytelling. Its characters are active, and there’s frequently a sense of cause and effect as opposed to a never-ending “this happens, then this happens, then this happens.” A comment made at the beginning of an episode will have effects towards the end, or someone did X, which causes Y to happen, and now Z. Sometimes the storylines are kept separate and sometimes they weave together, but either way, there’s always a sense of progression. 

Like any show, its quality depends on the content and not just the structure. But at least Jersey Shore rises to that standard. A lot of reality shows can’t even do the structure.

It may seem like a lot of praise to throw at the dumb reality show. But good trash is better than just regular trash. Also eat a dick.

On the Show’s Portrayal of Italians and Jersey

This is tricky territory for me, for as you may have surmised from my last name, I am not Italian. But you can’t help but think about its portrayal of Italians not only because the show constantly threw it in your face, but because when the show was initially airing, that was the main controversy that took up the discourse. Or at least one of them.

I can only speak anecdotally, and on a personal level, I don’t think it makes Italians look all that bad. Let’s set aside the fact that a lot of the behavior on the show is standard dumbass twenty-year-old shit (more on that later) and that all that GTL stuff was hardly exclusive to Italians. (I may not be Italian, but I did grow up adjacent to and with a ton of family in the tri-state area. I have no idea whether or not this is still part of the culture as I’ve lived on the west coast for ten years now, but at the time, plenty of non-Italians were hitting the tanning beds and the gym, then going out at night and acting like douchebags.) When I see a cast member behaving badly or doing something I don’t agree with, I don’t blame their ethnicity. I blame it on their character.

It’s hard to know how the show really feels about how it’s portraying these people. Sometimes, it goes out of its way to distance the cast from other Italians. Aside from some small comments here and there about some frustrations with their roots, season four finds the cast in Florence, and most of the season is them realizing how out of place they truly are as they constantly fail to fit in and generally make asses of themselves. By the end, they seem thrilled to go home. One could also make the argument that, again, it’s really more tri-state culture than Italian culture. But that said, it would be dishonest of me to pretend that the show doesn’t constantly drape itself in the Italian flag as each of the cast members has made being Italian part of their brand. (Including the ones who aren’t actually Italian.)

I’m not going to pretend that everything the show does is above board. If you represent a particular ethnicity, and there was a show that claims to represent said ethnicity you think makes your group look bad, it’s perfectly reasonable to get upset and start some discourse. But I can’t help but feel like at the end of the day, I personally think the show makes being Italian look fun. Not that my opinion means anything because, again, I am very much not Italian. (I’m Ukrainian, Polish, and some other European stuff that isn’t Italian.)

Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older, but one of the things I like the most about Jersey Shore is that they do family dinners. I like the kinship it represents, and I like how they constantly tie it back to their experiences with their own Italian families. (It certainly doesn’t hurt that I’m a sucker for Italian food.)

And it’s not just the family dinners, but the way that their families welcome each other into their lives. The camaraderie and the mirth. Yes, the show has a lot of interpersonal drama and some real ugliness we’ll get into in a second. But I don’t know. To me, the Italian angle of the show is its biggest source of genuine warmth, and I find it infectious. There’s cause to feel otherwise, but it’s not what I think of first.

There’s also the show’s representation of Jersey. A lot of that discourse was led by then Governor Chris Christie, a festering anal polyp of a human being who’s probably the actual worst thing to happen to Jersey in my lifetime. The less said about him, the better. 

The Biggest Problem with the Show is Much Darker

In the second episode of the show, cast member Angelina says, “If a girl’s a slut, she should be abused.”

Yup, you guessed it. The biggest problem with the show is our good friend gender.

Though most of Jersey Shore aired during the Obama administration, it was conceived of during the Bush years, and its cast members constantly demonstrate those values. (Setting aside the point that we clearly weren’t as evolved as we thought we were in the Obama years, but I digress.) The men are expected and expect themselves to perform traditional alpha masculinity, the men expect the women to do stereotypical “female” household roles, and the women frequently judge each other and other women for not adhering to certain traditional standards.

It’s debatable whether or not the show is actively encouraging these standards. The show wants us to like these people, and thus it wants us to appreciate their values, or at least find them relatable. However, the show also regularly makes fun of them, putting a distance between the audience and the cast. It permits you to relate, but it also permits you to judge. No matter how you feel, however, it’s clear that a lot of the cast members buy into toxic gender shit on some level, and that in and of itself is a problem, especially when they take things too far.

There are several instances in which The Situation brings home a woman and when it becomes clear she won’t have sex with him, he’s rude and and dehumanizing to her. Not particularly shocking behavior from the show that introduced “grenade” into our lexicon, but even by those standards, it can be hard to watch. Sammi hates the idea of her boyfriend Ronnie being friends with her (at the time) nemesis JWoww so much that she commits an on-camera act of domestic violence and punches him in the face. Specific examples aside, if one were to take every sentence of the show and calculate how much of them are about judging women, I wouldn't be surprised if it was over half.

What I take from this is that Jersey Shore isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom. Ask not if the show is trash. Ask what it means that MTV said yes to airing it in the first place. Why did this network surveyed the American populace and where we were as a culture and aired this show and not something else? From a financial standpoint, they clearly made the right choice, as this show was a cultural phenomenon. The job of these networks is to sell ad time, and they can do that by giving us what we want based largely on research and focus group testing and all forms of data on what we consume and why. So why did we want this?

Looking Back On It Now, It’s More Relatable Than You Probably Want to Admit

Apart from the family I have in the tri-state, I also went to Sarah Lawrence College, and it was during my time here that Jersey Shore fever finally died down. At the time, I thought it was easy to look down on the cast of Jersey Shore. That these people were douchebags and dumbasses, and I, in my elite liberal arts institution, was surrounded by peers like myself who were above such behavior. 

Looking back on it now, I’m not so sure that was the case. 

The couple that in many ways defined the show (and arguably led to its dip in quality) is Ron and Sammi. Their relationship seemed a bit more nuanced when I first watched this show in my sophomore year dorm, but mostly because I didn’t know better. Looking at it now, it seems pretty obvious that they were never right for another for a multitude of reasons, but all of them are fairly common. Insecurity, toxicity, poor communication, emotional ignorance, jealousy, and any and all other problems you can associate with bad relationships between inexperienced young people. Despite all these problems, they were constantly able to pull each other back into their romantic orbits over and over again. However, it would always lead to another massive fight and another needlessly dramatic breakup. None of this was helped by the fact that they both had a seemingly infinite supply of alcohol at their fingertips at all waking hours of the day and night. 

I think about this couple, and in hindsight, I can see shades of them in many of the couples, or even just sexual partners, throughout college. Some of them broke up for actual substantial reasons, but mostly it was young drunk people not knowing better and thinking that they had the emotional intelligence to make a relationship work when they clearly didn’t, and this also extends to hook-ups and fuck buddies and, hell, even just basic friendships. Granted, I don’t drink. But I was certainly not above anything I’m talking about, and if you’re reading this, I doubt you were either.

There’s other behavior as well, mainly amongst the men. When we talk about the male cast members, The Situation, Ronnie, Vinny, and Pauly, we seem to talk mostly about or around the fact that they spent the majority of the show being sex-crazed maniacs. Going to the club practically every night and having a room in the house exclusively for sex and so on.

In hindsight, a lot of the men at my college weren’t any different. It was just a matter of how they expressed it and went about it. The Situation was an open book. He would tell women they were attractive, he would engage in a little light conversation, he would drink, he would dance, and if he was lucky, he would bring her home. At Sarah Lawrence, it was a little more underhanded. A lot of men would feign sensitivity and demonstrate knowledge of social structures meant to manipulate women, and they did this pretty much to manipulate women. This isn’t to say that every man on campus was toxic or conniving, but in hindsight, the only substantial difference between The Situation and certain men on campus was that the Sarah Lawrence student could tell you what “diaspora” means. They would also insist that they weren’t being douchebags, and if you strapped them to a polygraph, it would probably say that they thought they were telling the truth. But they would be lying, to you and to themselves.

And, once again, add the near-constant presence of alcohol and drugs to make every problem substantially worse. (They don’t show any drugs on the show, but setting aside The Situation later admitting to being an addict, if you know what to look for you can see it all over.) 

Every year during conference weeks, weeks that were effectively our exam period, a thing would go up called SLCAnon. A forum mainly used to talk shit about other students and just generally be a toxic dickhead. Moreover, Sarah Lawrence was one of the many colleges named in a federal inquiry into the handling of sexual assault (I knew the victim in passing) and Larry Ray was allowed to stay on campus and begin a cult. Meanwhile, though we do know some true ugliness that happened after the show, who knows what was allowed to happen in the Jersey Shore house. In either case, a lot of toxic behavior was enabled by those who lived together and those who were supposed to be watching them, be it a college administration or reality show producers.

One’s a house on seaside. One’s a college campus. Both are places where emotionally unintelligent kids in their 20s were drinking, having sex, and doing dumb shit on a near-constant basis.  The only difference was that the kids on the campus were pale as death, generally not into working out, and they paid to be there as opposed to getting paid. Other than that, the line between the two, at least to me, is blurry.

Some Quick Thoughts

• I didn’t want to have to dig into the pits of the internet to find examples of what I’m talking about, but I think the reaction to Jersey Shore from some people at the time was way more toxic than the show itself. Specifically, the glee in which a lot of people shared the footage of Snooki getting assaulted in the bar.

• I don’t know when The Situation’s addiction kicked into gear, but we know that it was well underway during season four. Knowing this, certain parts become less fun and more just… dark.

• Also re: season four not being fun, an outsized proportion of that season consists of Snooki being plastered on a near-constant basis, to the point where I began to wonder if she has a problem. Yeah, you’re on vacation. Kind of. But it’s every episode and most of the story beats.

• Earlier, I said that Sam and Ronnie led to the decline of the show’s quality. What I meant was that the storyline becomes repetitive, you’re actively rooting for them to break-up, and once they finally do, the show has spent so much time on them that it doesn’t really have much to pivot to and thus it just spins its wheels for a while.

• Every season, they make the cast members work a job. This recurring element seems to be there for filler, and potentially to annoy some of them into waking up early so they can wring some material out of them being hungover on the job. Maybe it’s there for nostalgia’s sake. To remind you of the shitty summer jobs you had to work. But I think it’s just to have something to cut to.

• I have not seen any of the reboot series. I kinda want to out of curiosity.

• A major point of redemption for the show: You get the sense that they care about one another at the end of the day, and unlike a lot of other reality TV, their beefs rarely spill out of the confines of the show. It makes the sincerity of the show feel real.