Snooki's getting her own Ridiculousness spin-off to overload MTV's schedule with
MTV—the network where you can watch Ridiculousness, Ridiculousness, or a half-hour of Fresh Out Live before switching back to a marathon broadcast of Ridiculousness—has just announced that it’s diversifying its scheduling options…by ordering a spin-off of Ridiculousness. Specifically, Deadline reports that the network has just granted Jersey Shore star Snooki her own show, Messyness, built off the same “Let’s make the internet farm up some content for us” model that’s made Rob Dyrdek’s show a very cheap, very unshakeable part of MTV’s programming strategy over the last few years.
Specifically, it sounds like Messyness—which will also star Tori Spelling, Adam Rippon, and Teddy Ray as Snooki’s loyal cadre of panelists—will center primarily on romance and dating fails, i.e., “everything from awkward proposals, to nights out gone wrong and cheaters caught red handed.” That’s in contrast to the other Ridiculousness spin-0ff, Deliciousness, which is food-focused, or the mothership show, which is “Basically anything we can milk 30 minutes from off of the internet, with accompanying commentary so that we can argue that what we’re doing is transformative.”
The merits of the Ridiculousness strategy, such as they are, has been examined pretty exhaustively in recent years—basically, the show costs very little time or money to produce, and the network’s ratings only go up the more they air it. It’ll be interesting to see if Snooki’s show, powered by some actual MTV star power, can get out of the massive shadow of its parent series, though; Deliciousness usually only manages to get on the air a couple of hours a week, crowded out as it is by a wave of Dyrdek’s un-ending vigil. Hopefully the proposition of seeing Snooki and Tori Spelling go “Oh shit, that’s wild” after some dummy parachutes into a volcano as part of a marriage proposal gone awry will help distinguish the series from the ever-encroaching Ridiculousness blob.