MTV 'SHORE' LEAVE
Guidos bid goodbye as hit show is canceled
The tanning booth is finally closed. Brokenhearted guidos went into mourning yesterday as MTV pulled the plug on the realityshow train wreck “Jersey Shore.”
The sixth season, which starts Oct. 4, will be the last for Snooki, The Situation and the gang, whose drunken seaside antics introduced slang words like “grenade” and “gorilla” into the lexicon and made the show the top rated in MTV history.
“Yes, sadly it’s true. This upcoming season of Jersey Shore will be our last,” Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi tweeted moments after the network announced the cancellation.
“But it was fricken INSANE. I will always love my roomies!”
The show began in 2009, featuring a group of thenunknown young “guidos” and “guidettes” boozing the summer away in the Jersey Shore boardwalk town of Seaside Heights.
Their dopey, drunken devotion to hair spray, tanning and fashion (and that was just the guys) immediately made them an international sensation.
The worse they acted, the more people watched. As episodes aired featuring Snooki getting slugged in the face and musclebound castmate Ronnie Ortiz-Magro getting arrested for fighting, the ratings nearly quadrupled to 4.9 million at the end of Season 1.
In Season 4, which was shot in Italy, one episode attracted 8.9 million viewers — the largest audience for any episode of any show in MTV history.
Cast members were as proud of their Italian heritage as of their tans, but Italian groups saw them as an embarrassment to the nation of da Vinci and Galileo.
As they filmed a final season in Seaside Heights this summer, many of the stars appeared ready to move on.
Snooki, who gave birth to a son on Sunday, and Jennifer “Jwoww” Farley have their own MTV reality show. Paul “Pauly D” DelVecchio has found success as a DJ, and Michael “The Situation” Sorrentino is appearing on “Big Brother” in England.
Yesterday, the cast members turned to Twitter to say goodbye.
“It’s been one hell of a ride but this is just the beginning! Thank you all for your love & support throughout,” Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola tweeted.
And Pauly D wrote, “I Must Say, Sad To See It Go, But Am So Blessed To Have Been Apart Of This !!!!”
While ratings for “Jersey Shore” dropped in Season 5, they were still strong. But the show would have gotten very expensive for the network to produce with the cast’s contracts set to end after Season 6.
Additional reporting by Michael Shain