How To Watch Television

16. Jersey Shore: Ironic Viewing

148 16 Jersey Shore Ironic Viewing Susan J. Douglas Abstract: One of the most popular shows among young audiences in its day, Jersey Shore raises numerous questions about boundaries of taste and quality in both “real” behaviors and television. Susan Douglas argues that by looking closely at how the show addresses its audience with an assumed ironic distance, we can see how the series both transgresses and reinforces traditional social norms. On December 8, 2009, MTV unveiled another “reality” TV show with a highly conventionalized format: select a group of male and female twentysomethings, put them in a house together, make sure the bar is fully stocked, mount cameras everywhere, see what happens, and edit for maximum drama. This was a formula that, since the premiere of The Real World in 1992, had served the network quite well. But while the formula remained roughly the same, the cast didn’t. Unlike The Real World, which over the years had come to traffic in juxtaposing different “types”—the naive country bumpkin, the urban African American woman, the homophobe, the player, the blond party girl—or Laguna Beach and The Hills, which featured primarily blond So-Cal rich kids, Jersey Shore (MTV, 2009–2012) took quite a different tack. This time, MTV selected self-identified “Guidos” and “Guidettes,” lower-middle-class or working-class Italian Americans, the kind of young people rarely seen on TV, and threw them all together in a beach house in Seaside Heights, New Jersey.1 Amidst controversy about ethnic stereotyping (not to mention poor taste), the show quickly became a sensation and MTV’s top-rated series of all time. By the time of the show’s fourth season in the summer of 2011, which transported the cast to Florence, Italy, the trade press was labeling Thursday night television “Jerzday ”; not only did the show beat its broadcast competition on Thursday night, but for weeks it was the most watched program on cable. Just as important, it was the top overall television show among that most coveted demographic, teens and young people between the ages of twelve and thirty-four.2 Jersey Shore 149 How are we to account for the success of this show? After all, by nearly any conventional standard, Jersey Shore is dreadful: it is structurally formulaic, the characters cartoonish, their behaviors crude, often anti-social, and repetitive. Each episode consists of recurring déclassé elements like excessive drinking often resulting in vomiting, grind dancing in bars, fist fights (among the women as well), multiple sexual encounters, and melodramatic conflicts over the most trivial issues, like who said what to whom in what tone of voice. Nonetheless, when a show, however banal, becomes a big hit, we need to think about what kinds of anxieties and aspirations it may be revealing and managing.3 This is particularly true when a popular cultural form is denounced by traditional arbiters of taste as trashy, inauthentic, and cynically manufactured. Now, there is every reason to believe that Jersey Shore was indeed all of these things, but it still must have been doing some kind of cultural and ideological work to be so successful. One must always place media texts within their historical context to fully appreciate what contemporary issues they might be working through, standing back from the shows to examine how they address their audiences. Why are the cast members compelling? What behaviors, and disputes about behaviors, are the main focus of the show? How does it balance predictability and surprise? What norms does it reinforce and what taboos does it violate? And do the conflicts and behaviors tell us anything about the situation young people (and not just “Guidos ” and “Guidettes”) find themselves in at this particular moment in history? Before attempting to answer these questions, we need to review the appeal of “reality TV” programs. From an industry perspective, they are cheaper to produce than scripted programs as they don’t require elaborate sets and locations, or highpriced talent. And from Super Nanny to The Real Housewives (of wherever) to The Real World, reality TV shows use idiotic, arrogant, or self-destructive behaviors which we are urged to judge and which are designed to make us feel much better about ourselves: however dumb or selfish we were today, at least we weren’t like that. Indeed, unlike complicated economic or political debates, the dramas and conflicts on these shows hail us as absolute, knowledgeable authorities about right and wrong, what should and should not...