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"Jersey Shore" is the best comedy of the season.
The latest supposed reality offering from MTV is, by and large, the funniest thing I've seen on television in a long time. Sorry "30 Rock" and "The Office," but you've had your comedy batton transferred to the Garden State.
Not that "Jersey Shore" is actually a comedy. In fact, I don't exactly know what it's supposed to be. Much of what MTV puts out in terms of programming is dismissible trash. It's hastily edited to feed a maximum of drama allowing for a maximum of commercials.
Where "The Real World" was supposed to be a social experiment in which seven strangers are thrown together in a house for our voyeuristic pleasure, "Jersey Shore" is much less an experiment but a social statement – many of our peers are spoiled, self-assured idiots.
Look at the self-gratifying pleasure-fest that made up "Laguna Beach," "The Hills" and anything else where privileged teenagers think the world's biggest issues are who their other rich friends are hanging out with.
"Jersey Shore" is just attempting to show that idiocy spans from California to the show's namesake. For that, it is brilliant. This has to be MTV's white flag – it cannot stand by and attempt to justify this show or its content. It is simply stating "tuck in" for our next smorgasbord of alcohol-fueled drama and egos turned on to maximum.
I will explain, on behalf of our many New Jersey-born Mountaineers, that these are simply characters and exaggerated ones at that. Every culture has a stereotype, this just happens to be the one MTV can fully exploit the best and that we can relate to more easily.
With that in mind, we have to approach these cast members as characters. Anyone calling themselves a third-person moniker such as "The Situation" must be in on the joke.
The show spends much of its time as the group lives in a New Jersey apartment, working menial shifts at a local store, attempting to get "real." One girl has a breakdown in the season premiere as she struggles to face employment and not being treated like a princess at home. But in good plot-turn fashion, she stays, for however long, to prove something to herself.
Ah, emotional hook. Not long after, they all go out and get drunk, establish who is going to hook up with whom and what that means for the person who's got someone back at home. It is here the egos truly come out. The self-assuredness here is more obnoxious than any amount of cologne, popped collars or hair-gel could ever be.
It's car-crash television – you know it's bad, you want to change the channel, but you can't. "Jersey Shore" will work because of this.
The only concern this time, however, is whether or not the cast understands what is going on.
MTV isn't here to better understand the social stereotype of "guido" – a word the show freely bounces about. It isn't structured in such a way the show could be continued with regular cast-members, either.
I truly hope the cast members of "Jersey Shore" know they're being mocked by the network they aspired to be a part of. If not, the joke is on us, and we should all feel bad for laughing.
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