Tonight’s first new episode of Jersey Shore indulged in a shameless game of bait and switch. We were promised Summer fun at Atlantic City, a party destination where the hard-working intellectuals of Jersey Shore could finally cut loose, drink excessively, make out with strangers and have a blast. Yet the housemates didn’t make it to Atlantic City until forty minutes into the show. It was exactly like Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.
Cinephiles flocked to theaters to see just what would happen when the city that never sleeps met the masked psychotic who never stops killing drunken, horny teens but Jason didn’t even make it to Manhattan until 90 minutes in. And what did the notorious slasher do when he finally made it to New York City? He took in a Knicks game, saw Cats, visited the Empire State Building and took a romantic carriage ride around Central Park. It was, perhaps, a little anticlimactic.
Ah, but enough about Jason Voorhees and his tourist ways. We’re here to discuss the existential angst of hormone-crazed dumbasses in this here blog. Tonight we dealt with the ramifications of Snooki telling Sammi that the house was on the verge of staging an intervention to address their concern that Ronnie and Sammi were spending too much time together and not enough time doing shots and hooking up with anonymous strangers.
It was all very Real World. Sammi said it best when she opined, “Shut your fucking face. You’re just jealous!” Who wouldn’t be jealous of Sammi? I know viewers everywhere wish they were sleeping with a flesh-colored Incredible Hulk/poster boy for anger control problems.
Tonight’s episode of Jersey Shore once again found Snooki looking for love in all the wrong places: namely, the pants of random jerkoffs she meets in clubs. Pretty much every episode of Jersey Shore follows the same template: Snooki whines that she’s a nice girl who desperately get laid. Oh and also settle down and get married and be a veterinarian. She meets a dude at a club, brags that he’s the kind of nice guy she’s been pining for, then is sexually frustrated. Wash, rinse, repeat.
It’s all starting to get both sad and repetitive. Snooki really seems to be lurching into Anna Nicole Smith territory. Her desire to settle down and or fuck as many dudes as possible at 21 is poignantly pathetic. I’m guessing that someone has already greenlighted a show called Snooking For Love. Sadly, I would so watch that shit.
Meanwhile, Mike “The Situation” decided to ramp up his campaign of doucheiness. He was all over the place tonight: snitching on Ronnie to Sammi after finding him talking to a girl, pulling a “robbery” by making out with a woman who was previously making out with Vinny and, hilariously, lecturing Vinny on how to treat women after he felt Vinny hadn’t done right by his sister.
Over the past few episodes, the housemates have gone from finding The Situation hilariously tacky and shameless to intolerable. Who can blame them? If Jersey Shore were the high school it often suggests, then Ronnie would be crowned Most Likely to Murder Someone with his Bare Hands and Mike The Situation would be deemed Most Likely to Get Murdered in a Barroom Scuffle.
We got a little taste of both scenarios tonight. Ronnie hulked out, knocking some dude the fuck out after he talked just a little too much shit. Mike The Situation, meanwhile, got righteously punched in the face by JWoww after he
A. refused to take her back to their hotel room after she got blackout drunk
B. made fun of Snooki’s weight
Ah, weight. It’s an obsession among the Jersey Shore contingent. In an astonishing display of hypocrisy, the female housemates are constantly making insulting comments about other women’s weight problems, yet they turn into brawling warriors the second anyone says anything about the way they look.
On a similar note, the younger housemates are constantly marveling at people they consider ancient; I mean some of the people they mix it up with are thirty years old. Gross! Could they be any more ancient? I hate to break it to the cast but there will come a time in the not-so-distant future in which they too will be thirty years old. Hell, they may eventually be even older than thirty. There is a slim chance some of them will even make it into their forties.
Tonight, everyone’s dislike of Mike The Situation and his raging assholery bubbled up to the surface. Vinny and Mike nearly came to blows throughout the show and Mike resorted to asinine practical jokes and cutting comments in his ongoing, very successful attempt to make everyone hate him.
In the second episode DJ Pauly D encounters his very first stalker, an Israeli woman who is saving herself for marriage yet inexplicably seems to think her Bashert may be a crazy-coiffed juicehead. It was one of those situations in which both parties are wrong; the Jewish girl for stalking Pauly and Pauly for, well, behaving like Pauly.
Pauly said repeatedly that the woman in question had been stalking him his entire life which brings to mind the amusing image of the crazy Israeli building a time machine so that she could stalk Pauly during his childhood and adolescence.
Tonight offered double the guilty pleasures with two new episodes that were all kinds of fun. I’ll definitely miss these knuckleheads when the first season of Jersey Shore ends but the novelty and freshness has definitely worn off a little. Shit, I will still be first in line for a second season, which given the show's huge media profile and popularity—it's a bona fide pop culture phenomenon by this point—seems like an inevitability.
Stray Observations—
—“I looked slutty. I don't give a fuck! Ah, the Tao of Snooki.”
—“I guess (Snooki) wants to go out with a Big Bang, literally.” Wait, so Snooks is gonna hook up with the cosmic origin of the universe? Is it even muscular?
—“My boobs are so tight, I can't breathe!”
—“It goes back to the days of prehistoric kindergarten” That’s so Situation!
—“You spilled the Haterade!”
—“I was hooking up with some girl tonight, just like I do every night.” Oh, Situation. You are incorrigible!
—“I don't understand the religion or nothing. I just want to hit it.” How long until the entire bunch is sent to sensitivity training? I smell a spinoff!
—Oh, c'mon, Situation. Like you've never seen someone fucking your sister.
—The Situation’s sister: would you hook up with her? What if you met while creeping for creatures?
—The Situation lecturing someone on how to treat women. Oh, the irony!
—If Ronnie and Sammi Sweetheart don't make it, what chance do any of us have?