“Jersey Shore,” a recent addition to MTV’s fine family of reality shows, resembles the network’s pioneering series “The Real World,” which is now almost twenty years old—a human chemistry experiment with explosions guaranteed. In both shows, a group of carefully, cannily chosen people with big personalities—or personality disorders—are thrown together to live for a period of time with few obligations and all kinds of ways to create a lifetime of regrets, not least for viewers. The logo of these shows might be one of those large red plastic cups used for beer (and beer pong) at frat parties, and in evidence in many teen-agers’ Facebook photos, signalling the overflow of alcohol and expectations that happens at large gatherings and the nausea that often results the next day, triggered partly by the fact that someone caught it all on camera. In “Jersey Shore,” which takes place in the scruffy resort town of Seaside Heights, about a quarter of the way down New Jersey’s coastline, the explosions began even before the show premièred, in early December. Promos showing a group of young men and women of Italian heritage making entertainingly ridiculous statements about themselves and whooping it up on the boardwalk at night—dancing, throwing punches, that kind of thing—advertised “Jersey Shore” as set in a “house like you’ve never seen, full of the hottest, tannest, craziest Guidos,” and Italian-American groups, and eventually New Jersey tourism officials, protested and some of them called for MTV to cancel the series. Despite such dreamy free publicity, the first episode didn’t get good ratings. But a sneak preview that ran at the end of the episode showed one of the women in the house being punched by a drunken galoot at a bar, locking in more controversy and more viewers—fifty per cent more, in fact, for the second episode.

“Jersey Shore” makes us feel as though we were anthropologists secretly observing a new tribe through a break in the trees. Illustration By Steve Brodner

This is where I say, “MTV had a situation on its hands,” and people who have seen the show chuckle or groan, because they get the joke. One of the cast members, Mike, a voluble, occasionally charming Staten Islander (only one of the eight housemates is originally from New Jersey—go figure), is so proud of his gym-cut abdominals that he calls them The Situation. The nickname, he explained on the “Tonight Show,” came from an incident in a club when a couple walked by him and the woman was so captivated by his abs that she pointed at them. Mike’s friends said to him, “Dude, that’s a situation right there.” “And I said, ‘Yeah, I guess that is a situation,’ and it stuck.” We both do and don’t know what he means—I take it to mean that his abs have magnetic qualities and that his mere appearance in a room can have tectonic consequences. In fact, Mike has synecdochically enlarged that concept to denote his entire being: The Situation isn’t only what he calls his abs; it’s also his nickname for himself. “I just have unbelievable mass appeal,” he tells the camera in the second episode, though we’ve seen by then that his appeal is rather more of the niche kind.

Our ability to take any pleasure, or even interest, in shows like this—in which participants are depicted as energetic but essentially aimless, oblivious of their own deficits, and delusional about their attractiveness and their importance in the world—hinges not on our ability to identify with them but on our ability to distinguish ourselves from them. Unless the show manages to make us feel as though we were anthropologists secretly observing a new tribe through a break in the trees, it hasn’t done its job. MTV has succeeded on that score; it can give itself a pat on the back for enabling viewers to feel superior to at least eight other people. (Then it can stop patting itself and slap its forehead for not having realized that nobody says “Jersey Shore,” and that the title should have been “The Jersey Shore” or “The Shore.” And then it can go buy a dictionary and figure out what’s wrong with the following line, which appeared on the screen during the second episode, as a subtitle for what a doctor is saying to one of the housemates, who has pinkeye: “You can see where all the puss is forming.”) And yet we never have to feel any guilt over our condescension, because it’s so obvious that the cast members are in on the joke, too. They embrace their “Guido” identity, and insist that you don’t even have to be Italian to be a Guido or—the word for the female of the species—a Guidette. (Not all of the housemates are of Italian background, as it happens.) In any case, it’s something they’re proud of. Mike says that “girls love Guidos.” Pauly D, a d.j. from Rhode Island with an awesome straight-up hairdo that, according to him, takes about twenty-five minutes to perfect, says, “I was born and raised a Guido; it’s just a life style, it’s being Italian, it’s representing family, friends, tannin’, gel, everything.” Like all reality-show participants, Pauly D, The Situation, and the others speak in categorical certainties. They know things for sure, then those things blow up in their faces, then they hate those things and take about three seconds to find new things to believe in. The series is full of lines like: “My ideal man would be Italian, dark, muscles, juicehead, Guido. If I found that guy, I’d snatch him like that”; “I am the Kim Kardashian of Staten Island, baby!”; “My only rule: Never fall in love at the Jersey Shore. Never. Ever ever ever”; and “I am the fucking princess of fucking Poughkeepsie.” (The modifiers for “princess” and “Poughkeepsie” are bleeped, but there’s no doubt about what’s being said. There’s more swearing on TV these days than there used to be, and, at the same time, the length of the bleeps has been reduced, giving us a clear aural outline of the words to assist us in our lip reading. Like pasties in a burlesque show or thong underwear, bleeps are a saucy wink at the rules.) One housemate’s characterization of her own mating habits has become a viewer favorite, and it’s repeated during the credits of every episode: “I am like a praying mantis—after I have sex with a guy, I will rip their heads off.” Snooki, the princess of Poughkeepsie, is a tiny and very peculiar twenty-two-year-old who is out of control in so many ways (she had the distinction of being the first housemate to overdrink and then vomit; that happened within the first twenty-four hours) that she’s doomed to have her own show one day. And that’s what she’s angling for. She has already come up with a title: “Snookin’ for Love,” as she said to Conan O’Brien. Snooki (her real name is Nicole) is the woman who is punched in the face by a guy in a bar; it’s an ugly scene, and MTV has milked it with cool proficiency. But we can’t hold MTV responsible for Snooki’s signature hair pouf—that’s all Snooki’s doing. It’s quite a situation.

Who knows how many hours of dull footage had to be thrown away in order to get such gems? Many hundreds, I’m guessing; even the biggest narcissist needs coaching when it comes to appearing on camera. But, to a great extent, the people on the show seem to have neither underpacked nor overpacked their crazy suitcases. They knew, instinctively or consciously, what to bring: a little swearing, a little temper, a need for attention, a large bottle of immodesty, and the ability to deliver a sound bite. This makes them fascinating, though no more so than any of the other reality-show characters we’ve come to know in the past ten years. (Yes, my friends, it will be ten years this summer since nearly sixty million of us watched wily Richard Hatch, the first reality-show contestant to become a household name, win the million-dollar prize in the first season of “Survivor.” And guess where I was that August evening? In a bleeping summer rental at the Jersey bleeping Shore, and that’s a legit bleeping fact.) We’re so aware of the drag on people who go on TV now: they’re pulling several decades of popular culture behind them. The “Jersey Shore” housemates have a particularly heavy load, consisting of all the attitudes, looks, poses, burdens, and aromas of Italian-American culture, from “The Sopranos” back to Sinatra and including “Grease” and the Fonz and “Goodfellas.” Silvio, Tony Soprano’s consigliere, was known among the gang for his imitation of Al Pacino in “The Godfather: Part III”; it was a case of an Italian-American TV writer giving a fictional gangster lines that came from a real movie that was a sequel to a movie that was based on a novel that was based on real people. Then there are the further Garden State echoes. Steven Van Zandt, who played Silvio, grew up in New Jersey and is in Bruce Springsteen’s band—a band that was shaped by the Jersey Shore and is now its proudest product.

So “Jersey Shore” is itself an amusement on the boardwalk at Seaside Heights, a Ferris wheel of quotation marks, and yet it really isn’t fun to watch. It just goes around and around. A little digging into the concept of Guidoism brought me to an amateur documentary on YouTube. Shot last year somewhere on the Jersey Shore, it told me in less than seven minutes more about Mondo Guido than five episodes of “Jersey Shore” have. Even now, I know almost nothing about Mike, Pauly D, Snooki, and the rest of them. They’re a wearying bunch, who somehow became notorious in less than a month’s time, showing up on talk shows, appearing in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and—more quotation marks—making a video in which they pretend that they’re proper actors who are merely playing Guido roles. On the show, they don’t do anything except sleep and party and drink and hook up and spend quality time with their hair. They’re a few minutes’ walk from the ocean, yet we’ve never seen them go swimming—they just slop around in their rooftop Jacuzzi, whose presence is so central to the men’s seduction rituals that it’s practically a character in the show. As such, it fits right in, being both of Italian-American descent and an embarrassing reality-show cliché. ♦