Jersey Shore burst onto US TV screens last year like a hairspray explosion in a holiday suitcase with a concept so ridiculous and boring-sounding that it does a 360 and comes back to you as Jersey Shore. The premise: eight self-proclaimed Guido’s and Guidettes (the younger generations term for a good looking Italian, the older generations term for a lower working class chav, essentially an ethnic slur) living in rented accommodation along the New Jersey beachfront. That’s it. No secret rooms or hidden cameras. Just a 3-storey beach house in a part of town known to locals as “Sleazeside Heights”, occupied by people who all appear to have nicknames, like JWoww and Snooki and Pauly D, one guy even naming his abs “The Situation”. By the fourth episode there had been 3 hook ups, 1 break up and a knock out at a local club. It had also sealed itself as car-crash TV and an ultimate must-watch.
Having finally arrived in the UK on MTV a few weeks ago, Jersey Shore came shrouded in controversy. The first show had barely scrapped over a million viewers when first screened in America and UnicoNational, the largest Italian-American organization in the States was outraged. Soon sponsors were pulling out left right and centre. Even Jersey Shore hated Jersey Shore. The entire borough. The New Jersey Convention and Visitors Bureau issued a statement calling MTV and the TV show itself a “one-dimensional, dramatized version” - which only got our taste buds pumping for more scandal. Then something happened.
As each episode aired the ratings began to rocket and by the season finale, 4.8 million people tuned in. The US had become Jersey Shore obsessed.Michael Cera slopped gel onto his hair and posed with Pauly D. Olympic snowboarder Shaun White said he wanted to appear as an extra. Snooki partied with Lindsay Lohan. Leonardo DiCaprio offered advise to Vinny about the dizzy heights of fame. The band Phoenix called Snooki a prostitute in French on the red carpet at the Grammys and instead of questioning how she had even managed to get on the red carpet at the Grammys we instead reached for our laptops and Googledcagole. If someone had asked you for a sign that the world was ending, surely this was it.
In a way Jersey Shore had become the antibody to reality TV shows. It was fighting back against everything else currently happening within the world of reality TV and we applauded them for it.They relished in what programs such as The Hills were desperate to escape from. The press could call them fame hungry, self-obsessed bozos and it wouldn’t matter because to them that was the highest form of complement.
I found myself wanting to know just how Pauly D got his hair so spiky and looking forward to seeing Snooki shuffle around the house in pink slippers and talking to her parents on a duck-shaped phone. It was everything Big Brother should’ve been and as the credits roll at the end of every episode, I sometimes think I can hear the Channel 4 directors quietly weeping.
