Enjoy it while it lasts, guys...
Season 3 was when the show kind of started to nosedive for me. The most despised member of the house from the 1st 2 seasons, Angelina, wasn’t coming back. The producers had an opportunity to spice up the show with a replacement Guidette, but for some reason went with an even dumber, even less attractive version of Snooki. To me, Deena was a show-killer in many respects, but the show had gotten stale anyway. Every episode was basically hijacked by the Ronnie-Sam relationship explosion angle. The other most interesting characters from the 1st couple of seasons, Situation and Snooki, became increasingly uninteresting. The daily cycle of GTL, drunken club debauchery, and smush room hookups had started to get boring. (The producers originally tried to shake things up in Season 2 by moving the cast to Miami, but while South Beach is a different scene entirely from Seaside Heights, it wasn’t different enough to throw a real monkey wrench into the show.) The plan to have the housemates shoot a season in Italy for Season 4 sounded like a disaster before it even started, and anyone who watched would be hard-pressed to argue against that point. Miami didn’t take the cast far enough out of their comfort zone…Italy was a little bit too far. Personally, I think that the no-brainer location for them to shoot a season (if they don’t make other changes…more on that in a sec) would be Las Vegas. The possibilities of a Vegas season seem endless: Pauly D and Vinny hooking up with strippers, Situation going broke at the Blackjack table, Ron and Sammi getting married at an Elvis chapel and then getting the marriage annulled the very next day, and on and on and on…
Instead, Season 5 disappointedly took place back at the Jersey Shore. It appears that the producers are content riding this thing out using the status quo until people stop watching entirely. On the one hand, it’s hard to blame them. No one could have predicted the show’s success. Everyone involved got rich off of something that probably cost little to nothing to make (as far as TV shows go). And even as naysayers like myself sit and complain about the show, I still didn’t miss a minute of it this year…not exactly a lot of incentive to keep it fresh. If not for a Vegas season, which I think would be great, I fully subscribe to some ideas that I’ve heard Bill Simmons and Dave Jacoby rattle off on the “BS Report” podcast. A completely new cast would definitely stir things up. We have fallen in love with these guys over the years, but I think we could just as easily get geeked-up over 8 new people…and the amount of people lined up when the producers were casting the “New Jersey Shore” (pun intended) would rival “American Idol.” How would the talent level of the show not be upgraded? Another suggestion those guys had that I’m stealing is to keep the old cast, but create a new rival house with 8 new characters. The potential for tension, bar fights, and Romeo and Juliet type romances seems pretty high there (all of which would make for good TV). At the very least, some type of format change is needed (also a stolen idea). The show is still shot in the same way it was back in Season 1, when we didn’t know J-Wow, Pauly D, and Vinny from any other young drunk people at the local bar. Now, these guys are legit celebrities, and it’s obvious how aware they are of the cameras and their celebrity status. To pretend that there aren’t hundreds of people who know who they are and are trying to get at them when they walk into a club or a dozen security guards on the other side of the camera at all times is silly. Also, having them work at a boardwalk t-shirt store or a pizza parlor is just asinine at this point. Why not show these guys living it up a little (and I don’t just mean drinking at Karma)? Otherwise, we are stuck with watching Snooki urinate in places not called a toilet over and over. Come on, “Jersey Shore” people…let’s try a little bit harder here. And now because I like making lists so much, here is somewhat of a “Jersey Shore” power ranking, listing the least likable to most likeable cast members at this point in time.
Really? Again?!?
8. Deena…She has been killing the show for me ever since she 1st appeared. Frankly, she grosses me out. However, she did provide probably the funniest line of this past season when she mistakenly called Mike a “hermaphrodite.” The word she was looking for was “pyromaniac” though…close enough I guess.
6. Situation…After the 1st few “Jersey Shore” seasons, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Mike became the biggest “star.” Now, Mike just seems, for lack of a better word, “weird.” The past few seasons, he either had a producer in his ear telling him to start shit whenever the show hit a lull, he was too heavily medicated, or not heavily medicated enough…or maybe his loss of ab definition was the source of his confidence and swagger all along. Is it possible that his ever-fading 6-pack is the root of his growing weirdness?
Bro, why are you so weird?
5. J-Wow…Her bio on MTV.com still describes her as “impulsive and spontaneous,” and goes on to say, “Jenni is a party girl with zero self control,” but she has basically been wifed-up her entire history on the show with 2 different guys, thus making that party girl description a little misleading. For a while, it looked like WWE Diva was the next logical step for her career, but aside from a couple of fistacuffs with Sam a few seasons ago and the occasional stripper-esque club dress, she more resembles the house “mom” more than anything else. She might be the most blasé house member next to Sam.
4. Snooki…She is still good for a couple of one-liners and what only can be described as “Snooki moments” per show, but her act has gotten kind of old as well. Her having a boyfriend has also made her less interesting the past couple of seasons, as part of Snooki’s likeability and the comedy that followed her early on in the show revolved around her insecurities and her constant search for a man. I guess we can look forward to a Snooki Junior now sometime in the near future at least…scary.
3. Vinny…He’s grown on me over the years as he’s gone from probably the most reserved roommate to one of the most outspoken and humorous. He definitely seems like the most sensible person in the house, but this is my basketball team analogy with Vinny: on a championship team, he is like the solid, does-all-the-dirty-work power forward (setting screens, grabbing tough rebounds, running the floor etc.); if he has to be the superstar that you throw the ball into the post to 20 times a night, his team is bound for the draft lottery.
2. Ronnie…I acknowledge most people wouldn’t have Ron this high on their list, but I’ve always had a soft spot for him despite his roid-rage, furniture-rearranging moments. It’s nice to see a gentler, calmer version of “relationship-Ronnie,” as I think his sense of humor really started to come out this year, but there’s still a part of me that longs for the “single-Ronnie” who lies and makes out with girls on stripper poles, or at least the old “relationship-Ronnie” that throws mattresses and yells, “Come at me, bro!” to guys who mess with him on the boardwalk.
1. Pauly D…What a transformation for Pauly...he started out as the guy that we saw but never heard. He was almost like a mannequin of every exaggerated Guido trait: crazy blowout, unnaturally tan skin, gaudy chains, ridiculous tattoos (Cadillac…really?). As the show went on, we still knew little to nothing about him, but he at least became the show’s catchphrase guy (“T-shirt time,” “Cabs are here,” and, “Yea buddy,” among others). Somewhere between Seasons 3 and 4, he sneakily had become everyone’s favorite character on the show. The only thing I can really compare it to from my TV universe is “Family Matters,” where Steve Urkel started as a bit character playing the annoying, dorky, clumsy kid neighbor, and then morphed into the only reason people were even tuning in. I fear that Pauly’s meteoric rise is going to be followed by an equally meteoric fall though. In Season 5, he was still the most enjoyable person to watch on the show, but he almost seemed like a caricature of himself. His accent seemed even more over the top than before. His mannerisms seemed too rehearsed. It’s like he was trying to play up the things that people liked about him a little too hard…which stinks because what made him so likeable in the 1st place was that he had always seemed genuine and sincere despite his wackiness. In that way, Pauly D’s probelm is emblematic of the show’s problem as a whole. Now, sensing the wave of success that Pauly is riding on, MTV is going to spin him off into his own show, “The Pauly D Project.” I’m not sure whether Krissy and I will tune in or not, but I hope for his sake it’s not terrible. “More” is not necessarily always “better.” This is an idea that MTV has never really grasped before, so unfortunately I’m not sure why they would now.
...yep, enjoy it while it lasts.
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