Party’s over for Snooki and the gang
AFTER SIX HIT SEASONS ON MTV the Jersey Shore crew ponders life after reality TV
EAST HANOVER, N.J. — Relaxing in a pedicure chair one October morning here at a favourite nail salon, Nicole Polizzi, the diminutive troublemaker and reality-TV star known as Snooki on Jersey Shore, was explaining that she would wait until her infant son, Lorenzo, was 15 or 16 before sharing with him her goofy, boozy escapades from that MTV series.
“That’s when kids start to go out and have their first drink, go to parties and things,” said Polizzi, 25, who had recently returned from a tanning-products convention in Nashville, Tenn. “I’m going to say: ‘You know what? Mommy was just 21 years old, doing what everybody else does. She just had a camera following her.”’
Polizzi seemed to know exactly what she’d be doing in some far-off future, when she is laying down the rules rather than flouting them. But when it came to the nearer term — basically, any time after Thursday, when MTV will broadcast the final episode of Jersey Shore — she expressed an uncertainty shared by her soon-to-be ex-housemates.
“Because Jersey Shore made us,” she said, “so it’s like, what now?”
Incredibly it was only three years ago that MTV ran its first episode of Jersey Shore, its documentary-style account of four muscle-bound guys and four impossibly orange women partying down and hooking up in Seaside Heights, N.J.
Over six rapid-fire seasons, including excursions to Miami and Florence, Italy, Jersey Shore became one of MTV’s biggest hits ever, drawing nearly nine million viewers an episode at its peak and introducing terms like “smooshing” and the gym-tanning-laundry shortcut “GTL” (among less savory acronyms) to the American lexicon.
The series has also elevated its distinctively monikered cast members like Michael Sorrentino (a.k.a. the Situation), Jenni Farley (JWoww) and Paul DelVecchio (Pauly D), making them the envy of unemployed milliennials, the scorn of Italian-American advocacy groups and unlikely ambassadors of their hurricane-devastated coastal escape.
But now these improbable celebrities are bracing themselves for a different kind of reality, when the parties and press tours — and the cornerstone TV show that supported them — go away, leaving viewers to take stock of why they tuned in, and its subjects to wonder if their fame could fade as rapidly as it arrived.
“We were regular people a couple years ago,” said Vinny Guadagnino, a Jersey Shore star. “I don’t want it to stop.”
At an Italian lunch in the West Village with the other men of Jersey Shore, Guadagnino said MTV had been vowing to cancel the show almost from its first season, possibly to see how the housemates would react. “We always think they’re bluffing,” he said.
Chris Linn, MTV’s executive vice-president for programming, said by telephone that the decision to end Jersey Shore — for real — came down to its cast “moving on to the next stages of adulthood.”
With milestones like the birth of Polizzi’s son and Farley’s engagement, Linn said, the series “was moving away from the original conceit, and rather than drive it into the ground or milk it to the very, very end, we wanted to give it a dignified sendoff.” (In a current season more about personal reflection than gratification, the show has also seen its numbers ebb to less than four million viewers an episode, though it remains strong among the younger audience MTV covets.)
When that final day of taping Jersey Shore occurred in the summer, and its housemates were allowed for the first time to interact directly with crew members and onlookers, “I had a nervous breakdown in the middle of the street, crying,” Farley said.
“It was so bittersweet. That’s the house that changed my life.”
As Farley and her co-stars Samantha Giancola and Deena Nicole Cortese sipped ginger ales and Diet Cokes at a Times Square hotel bar, the women, attired in animal-print outfits, said they had come onto Jersey Shore with minimal expectations. Yet they were well prepared by the wide range of reality shows they had watched, from great-grandparents of the genre like The Real World to more recent offerings like Real Housewives and Bad Girls Club. They knew there would be no privacy from the cameras rolling 24/7, and that the editing would not always portray them in flattering light.
“I say everything on that show is completely real,” said Giancola, whose on-andoff romance with her co-star Ronnie Ortiz-Magro was a long-running Jersey Shore soap opera. “What I said is real, how I acted is real. But it is a TV show, and you’re only seeing 45 minutes. You’re not seeing the full picture of everything.”
Sorrentino, who is gentler and more humble since a stint he did in a substanceabuse rehab program this year, agreed, in his own way, that Jersey Shore had not always allowed its ensemble members to display their full range of emotions and abilities. “We’re all very dense human beings with lots of different facets,” he said. “And I think you only get to see that one side — the party side.”
Perhaps more than their constant falling down, their drunken fist fights and shouting matches, it was the cast members’ rare aptitude for expressing themselves, candidly and without varnish, that won them acknowledgment from President Barack Obama and fans like Leonardo DiCaprio.
Maybe it was the way they reaffirmed viewers’ understanding of a certain middleclass vacation culture, or introduced it to audiences who found it completely alien. Or maybe, as the Jersey Shore executive producer SallyAnn Salsano argues, the series took the place of coming-of-age dramas like Beverly Hills 90210 or the John Hughes movies from her youth.
“For all of their faults, they’re actually really good kids,” said Salsano, who is 38 and spent many summers in Jersey Shore share houses. “I did the same thing. I lived in my parents’ house in my mid-20s, making more money than my dad, but they were making my lunch and putting gas in my car.”
For several of its stars, Jersey Shore represented the first time they’d lived on their own, cooked their own meals or checked themselves onto airplanes without a parent’s assistance.
To the men, it was an introduction to life with women who did not conform to traditional stereotypes. “You get these girls, and they’re drinking out of bowls, their underwear’s falling down,” Ortiz-Magro said. “I’m not used to that.”
To the women, the show was a crash course in coping with the criticism they have come to expect at appearances and on their widely followed Twitter accounts.
When Cortese joined Jersey Shore in Season 3 and was told by some viewers that she looked heavy, she said, “People would be like, ‘Don’t listen to them.’ But it always got me. I was like, ‘I’m seeing myself gain weight.’ ”
Among the men and women there was disagreement over just how famous Jersey Shore had made them and to what that renown entitled them.
“I don’t consider myself a celebrity,” Farley said. “It’s hard to think of yourself as a celebrity when you’re just yourself.”
Guadagnino, however, said the Jersey Shore housemates had become “A-list celebrities overnight,” then backed off slightly, adding that the show had put them “in the A-list crowd.” (“I won’t give myself too much credit,” he said.)
Ortiz-Magro said he was confident that “if we want this to become something more after Jersey Shore, it’s going to become something more.”
Guadagnino said his dream was “to be on a scripted TV show, a series, maybe get a pilot — not as the main character, just a role in the show.” (“What a humble guy, huh?” DelVecchio teased him.)
Make no mistake: Every member of the Jersey Shore troupe is now his or her own startup business, whether it is DelVecchio’s thriving career as a DJ or the array of licensed products they each endorse — energy drinks, fragrances, sunglasses and slippers.
As they perceive it, these side careers are independent from — and as important as — their status as reality-TV idols. As Polizzi put it: “I don’t care if I’m famous or not. I just want to have my brand.”
But Salsano cautioned that this visibility, in whatever form it takes, would not endure for all of them. “I’ll say: ‘Don’t get used to it. Enjoy it, but it’s not staying. And listen, God bless you if it does,’ ” she said.
Reality stars who have built lasting careers were the exception rather than the rule. “But I’ve done a bazillion of these reality shows,” said Salsano, who also produces shows like Tattoo Nightmares and Nail Files, “and I’ve never seen a cast go from zero to 100 like this.”
MTV is certain, too, that its own youth-culture brand will survive the loss of its most popular series. “We were in a similar situation post-Laguna Beach, post-Hills, post-Beavis and Butt-Head, post-The Osbournes,” Linn said. “We’ve always found a way to reinvent and to stay connected with our audience.”
For MTV, that crop of potential successors includes shows that star Jersey Shore alumni, like the spinoff Snooki & JWoww (which, after a moderately successful first season, resumes in January) and a talk show hosted by Guadagnino and set at his family home in Staten Island. No one is predicting that the reality genre has run its course, but Salsano said there was no harm in MTV giving the Jersey Shore franchise a rest.
“It’s OK for people to miss things,” she said. “But that’s the American culture. You love something so much, you have it till you don’t want it anymore. And then you’re like, ‘Uch, I can’t eat pizza again.’ ”
Some cast members have at least begun to contemplate the possibility of a life without cameras and constant attention. If her own talkshow hosting aspirations do not pan out, Polizzi said, she would be satisfied to become a veterinary technician. Cortese said she could open a salon.
Other dreams, simpler and yet fleetingly elusive, would also seem to be within their grasp. When a follower on Twitter wrote to Cortese that “normal is how u perceive normal not what someone else tells you,” she replied, “yes and I can’t wait to be my normal again.”
For good measure she threw in an “lol” at the end.
Jersey Shore’s series finale airs Thursday at 10 p.m. on MTV Canada.