“Cabs are here!†The “Jersey Shore†gang is back—spray tanned and all. But this season, the crew takes Florence, Italy by storm. The past couple of years have been a wild ride for the eight roommates, each of them have gained instant fame because of the show. As one might guess, it isn’t their intelligence or their talent that makes them mega-stars, it’s the fact that they barely have either of those qualities.
Since 2009, the show has received a lot of controversy, because many think that it portrays Italian-Americans in a negative light. Before the show even aired, the UNICO National (an Italian-American service organization) requested that MTV cancel the show. When MTV announced that the “Jersey Shore†cast members and crew were going to Italy to film season four, there was a lot of outrage. “They embody the worst stereotypes of Italians, multiplied by thousands and Americanized,” columnist Roberto Del Bove wrote in the Rome newspaper New Notzie, according to the New York Post.
But insults from others didn’t stop them before, and they didn’t stop them now. According to MTV, the season four premier opened with a whopping 8.8 million viewers, the best season opener ever for MTV. Ratings continued to soar with a 7.8 million average in the third week.
The show’s primary viewers are teenagers and twenty-something’s, and they love the drama. They like to watch Sammi and Ronnie scream and swear at each other. They love to watch Mike, Vinny and Pauly-D fight over girls they met in the club, and who they are only going to be with for at most two nights. It’s the punching, pulling of hair, yelling and crying that the viewers love. And it’s this type of commotion that viewers tune into every Thursday night that has made reality TV so popular.
The first episode of “Jersey Shore†season four started out like any other, the four boys (Ronnie, Mike a.k.a. “The Situation,†Pauly-D and Vinny) arrived to their destination without any trouble. The four girls, on the other hand, (Snookie, Deena, Sammi and J-WOWW) ran into some problems, like exploding bronzer and landing in Milan, instead of Florence. The next couple of episodes weren’t anything special. The roommates tried out all of the different night clubs, and got into a couple of fights in each of them. They do GTL (gym, tan, laundry), and Ronnie and Sammie get into a fight yet again. Although the cast being in Italy is sometimes hilarious, the show really hasn’t given its viewers any surprises.
Obviously, the same old chaos of “Jersey Shore†hasn’t hurt the show. But will the millions of viewers get sick of watching the same thing every week? That remains to be seen. But for now, the eight roommates of Jersey Shore are still fist-pumping their way to the top, and not even an exploded can of bronzer is going to stop them.
