Hola trashbags, land mines and grenades. We’ve come to the end of another season of Jersey Shore. The reality television phenomenon once filled me with fevered, albeit guilty anticipation. Now if fills me with something closer to dread. We elevated these unknowns to trash-culture superstars so if they've turned into monsters of id and ego before our eyes we are at least partially to blame.
The season finale of Jersey Shore opens with the self-styled Guidos and Guidettes taking a field trip to the Florida Everglades. It made for less than riveting television (see also: this entire season) but it underlined how incredibly circumscribed the cast’s lives in Miami were.
Florida is a big, beautiful, insane state full of natural wonders and people who are out of their goddamn mind. It contains multitudes. It's a world onto itself, not unlike Texas and Alaska, two other states that may as well be foreign countries they have such strong, distinct cultures and identities. That didn’t interest the cast of Jersey Shore. For them, Miami was a home, a nightclub and a beach. Oh and maybe a gelato shop if they could muster up the energy to work the occasional eight-hour shift. That’s it. That’s all they care about. They’re defined by their rapacious lack of curiosity about the world around them.
After the gang returns home, Jersey SHore tries and fails to glean a little melancholy out of the cast’s imminent separation, from each other and the women they’ve been dating casually for several weeks. Vinnie and his boy DJ Pauly D are supposed to have semi-serious flames but it’s hard to be emotionally invested in the three-week fling between people incapable of expressing their feelings in anything other than caveman grunts. Remember when Vinnie seemed likable and smart? Whatever happened to that guy? He was replaced in the off-season by a colossal asshole who looked exactly like him.