Last night's was the penultimate episode of Jersey Shore's second season. It's time to start looking back at what has happened to one of my favorite shows on television.
When they began Jersey Shore MTV attempted something ingeniously simple: put a bunch of strangers in a house a la Big Brother but they are all from the same general area and have the same general goals and delusions. It was like putting scorpions in a Bell jar and seeing what they do. What was fascinating and foreign at first soon became tedious, familiar and pretty little sad.
But there's no way to revive the show! It's based completely on eight (or seven) personalities living together and being themselves. Now that those personalities have become brands MTV will never change them up but the schoolyard experiment is over. We know how these people interact with the world and each other. Bringing them to Miami was not a big enough change to give this season any spice. The only way the third season bringing the kids back to the actual Jersey shore will be interesting is if the show acknowledges how fact that their world has changed since the first season. These dunderheads are millionaires, for one thing. The Jersey shore itself is now festooned with memorabilia from the show. In a foggy part of my imagination I can think of what would make Jersey Shore interesting to me again (I think it would be kinda fascinating to see the cast dealing with groupies, idolaters and outraged locals who are ashamed to be associated with them) but I don't think it's going to happen. There's only so many ways MTV can beat this dead horse and I think the result is going to be pretty much what we saw last night.