Word: jersey
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...cast of Jersey Shore - gearing up to shoot Season 2 in the next few months - camera-readiness is second nature. These are the children of reality TV. In February 1992 - literally a generation ago - The Real World introduced MTV's viewers to living in public. Ten years ago, Survivor - now in its 20th season - mainstreamed the idea for older viewers. The Jersey Shore-ites have never known a world in which hooking up drunk in a house paid for by a Viacom network was not an option. This year in the coveted post-Super Bowl time slot, CBS showcased...
...what message is it all sending? The viralization of people like American Idol's General Larry (Pants on the Ground) Platt and William Hung before him has led to the charge that reality TV invites us to laugh at little people for sport. The fame of Jersey Shore's tanning-bed casualties and others brings the critique that reality TV celebrates violence, sluttiness (male and female) and other bad behavior...
These charges are so contradictory as to cancel each other out. How, exactly, can reality TV mock its participants and celebrate them at the same time? In fact, the audience's relation to reality shows is more complicated. People don't watch Jersey Shore because they consider the Situation a role model. It's entertaining because the show is basically satire, a pumped-up spoof of bigger-is-better American culture. (Quoth Jwoww: "I see a bunch of, like, gorilla juice heads, tall, completely jacked, steroid, like multiple growth hormone - that's, like, the type I'm attracted to.") (Read...
Even MTV, home of Jersey Shore, has the high-minded 16 and Pregnant (which often features working-class families, who scarcely exist in network drama nowadays); The Buried Life, about four friends who travel the world helping people accomplish things they want to do before they die; and My Life as Liz, a sort of reality My So-Called Life about a high school outcast in small-town Texas...
...these MTV shows as big or as widely hyped as Jersey Shore (which got nearly 5 million viewers for its season finale)? No. But that is on you and me, not on reality TV. And even in the cheesiest reality shows, there is an aspirational quality, a democratic quality, a quality that's - yeah, I'll say it - American. "American" in the sense that what is true of countries is true of TV genres: their worst traits are inseparable from their best ones...