Jersey Shore

This is the only image I could find for 'Jersey Shore' that had nothing to do with 'Jersey Shore.' You're welcome.

Up until now I had prided myself on not having watched an episode of the show Jersey Shore, a piece of reality programming so mainstream and white trash that I feel it barely deserves the italicized HTML coding I just gave it. As of this writing, my bio on Facebook simply consists of, ‘No, I don’t watch Jersey Shore.”

It may seem like a stupid thing to list as your Facebook bio, but I think that says a lot about a person – to declare that you don’t watch Jersey Shore means that you are more or less purposefully excluding yourself from a major part of American college culture. You’re abstaining from following the exploits of a group of 20something spraytanned blowjobs and their exploits in a world where MTV pays their rent and the cover charges for the various clubs they go to and start fights at.

Without having seen the show, my impression of Jersey Shore was the same as my impression of any other given reality show – MTV puts a bunch of attention whores into an enclosed space with nothing to do except drink and waits for the inevitable hormonal explosion, which they then videotape and throw on national television in between commercials and the occasional music video.

And I consider that to be cheap. It’s almost like cheating, to be honest, because everybody who has ever lived with anybody else knows that there’s going to be at least one filmable moment when somebody eats the other person’s Oreos for the umpteenth time. If nothing else, Jersey Shore is the epitome of Jean-Paule Sarte’s quote ‘Hell is other people’ from his play No Exit, and because this sentence reeks of egocentric English major bullshit, I’ll also go on record as saying that the 2008 Jason Statham film Death Race was seriously underrated.

So that’s why I was diligently avoiding Jersey Shore in the same way that I avoid Survivor, Big Brother, and C-SPAN – it’s a bunch of people I don’t particularly like running around and talking shit behind one another’s backs while being followed by a camera crew. Only for whatever reason, everybody I know can’t stop talking about Jersey Shore, as though the fact that the performers were tanner and more ethnic somehow made the show better.

Imagine my disdain when I came out of my room this morning in the early afternoon, still worn out after spending 17 hours in Autzen Stadium yesterday, to find my roommates watching Jersey Shore reruns. I was essentially trapped – I had already left my room, and due to a combination of physical exhaustion, muscle ache, and residual swamp ass from the day before I was unwilling to turn around and walk back when there was a perfectly inviting seat on the couch in front of our 62 inch TV waiting for me.

So I sat and watched Jersey Shore. I’m not proud of it, but I did it.

And let me tell you, folks, it was stressful as hell. The whole show is based on ugly, oversexed attention whores fucking and yelling at each other. It’s a show built around drama.*

*Drama is a word derived from the Greek word drao, or ‘to do’, and is a genre based on interpersonal conflict that has permeated human entertainment from Oedipus to Hamlet. Now, the word is most commonly used to describe screechy feuds between immature girls over who freakdanced on whose boyfriend at prom. Way to totally shit on linguistic, theatrical, and literary history, America.

I was surprised to see that in spite of the title Jersey Shore, the show appeared to be set in Miami, which, to my knowledge, is in the state of Florida. Maybe this was an artistic choice – after all, Chinatown mostly took place outside of Chinatown. Maybe the real Jersey Shore is less a location and more a state of mind. Or maybe the producers wanted to brand the show as different without altering anything about the tried and tested formula. Either or.

As I saw it, the show consisted of the interactions between groups of people wearing a few million dead lab rats’ worth of cosmetics – these interactions were limited to screaming, punching, or a bizarre sort of dancing that incorporates both fake screaming and fake punching.

On the episode I saw, two girls got into a fight in the kitchen, spilling food everywhere (no doubt attracting so many ants) before wandering off to their respective bedrooms to bitch to the camera crew about one another. Not long after, everybody went out to a nightclub and got drunk.

The reason I can’t find a show about a close knit group of alcoholics constantly fucking and fighting is because that’s my life already. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this at all on this blog, but I’m in the fucking Oregon Marching Band. That’s all we do. I can’t kick back and enjoy a bunch of stupid people yelling at one another for trivial reasons, because I already deal with that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 3:20 until 6:00, and also on select Saturdays throughout the fall.

I can’t watch Jersey Shore for the same reason ice road truckers probably can’t watch Ice Road Truckers - when I get home, I don’t want to relive the same stupid bullshit I deal with on a daily basis. If I’m going to watch a group of people backstabbing each other and passing around sexual partners, it had better either be in space or the early 1960s. Anything else is too close to home.

Truman Capps thinks a reality show about the Oregon Marching Band would be awesome – something he’s only saying because he wants MTV to foot the bill on Taco Tuesday.