At its core, Jersey Shore, which fist-pumps its way back onto MTV tonight, is a show about the fake: tangerine tans, hair extensions, steroid-enhanced muscles, plastic surgery (what’s going on with J-WOWW’s face?), backstabbing, and, of course, using promises and sweet words to get a girl into bed. In a world where celebrities blame puffy lips on the flu, this unapologetic embrace of all things artificial is somehow charming. But there’s one artificial convention that I can’t forgive: the way the show refuses to acknowledge the stars’ fame.
MTV has been guilty of this before: It famously edited The Hills around Lauren Conrad and Co.’s celebrity status, pretending they were just a bunch of girls trying to make it in Hollywood. Teen Mom has fallen into the same trap, which makes for some cognitive dissonance. The teenagers who by all logic should be broke and struggling seem flush enough to move house cavalierly and drive some pretty nice cars. (This week, the show finally drew back the curtain a little when troubled mom Amber Portwood said that she was being harassed because her legal woes were “all over the local papers.”) But the insistence that the Jersey Shore crew is just an anonymous clique is perhaps the most egregious.
When Jersey Shore became an unexpected hit, MTV scrambled to film a second season. The problem: The company needed to start production ASAP, but it was still too chilly to send the guidos and guidettes to the Northeast beaches. So the crew headed to Miami, beginning filming in April 2010. Season 2’s premiere opened with the cast complaining about the weather, as if they were just a group of friends who decided to head south for a month. “I’m freezing in Rhode Island. I need to get my ass to Miami,” Pauly D tells the camera. “You can’t creep in this weather.” In seasons 2 and 3, the show worked around the crowds that followed filming; occasionally, though, you could spot the Jersey Shore fans in the background, like when Snooki was arrested in Season 3 for public drunkenness.
The refusal to break the fourth wall doesn’t just affect the shots included and the premise of each trip. The gloss influences story lines, too. In Season 3, which was filmed immediately after the Sunshine State trip wrapped, soap operatic couple Ronnie and Sammi began to feud over Ronnie’s drunken flirtations with other women in Miami. She said it was because she “couldn’t get over it,” but reports from filming suggested that the real trigger was the fact that she had finally viewed footage of her beau’s behavior in Florida. Meanwhile, in another episode, fellow cast member Vinny complains about a girl “stalking” him and wonders why, when the answer seems clear: because you’re on a TV show, dude. Otherwise, she certainly would have left you alone.
This artifice seems to be the creation of the producers, not the stars. During Season 2’s filming, TMZ claimed that producers wanted the cast to avoid talking about fame, bragging about their paychecks, or making business deals, but Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino didn’t comply. “As a result, a lot of what’s already been shot is unusable, because it doesn’t even resemble a reality show,” TMZ said.
But blockbuster reality shows on other networks have managed to acknowledge their stars’ fame. On Bravo, the Real Housewives fight on air about who talked about whom to Page Six or Radar Online. Jon & Kate Plus Eight, in its time, contained shots of the paparazzi who hung around the Gosselins. This makes much more narrative sense, allows the show to be more natural, and isn’t so insulting to the audience’s intelligence.
If Jersey Shore would only follow suit, The Situation’s success with the ladies would seem far less inexplicable.
