Like sea turtles returning to bury their eggs, the cast of MTV’s Jersey Shore will once more beach their gel-hardened carapaces on the Atlantic coastline for the just-announced reunion series Jersey Shore Family Vacation. As the title suggests, the show will find this erstwhile gang of club approximate-kids now even older and ostensibly wiser, and some with their own spawn in tow, which they will hopefully resist the primal instinct to cover with the daiquiri-vomit-soaked sand of their birth.
It’s somehow only been five years since the world bid farewell to Snooki, J-WOWW, The Situation, Ronnie, Vinny, Sammi, Pauly D, and, I guess, Deena, although Jersey Shore now feels like a relic of a simpler time, when we all still had the brain capacity to laugh at the drunken bickering of idiots. Way back in those carefree days of assuming that these sorts of self-involved, proudly avaricious reality stars represented only a fringe element of society that would certainly never attain broader political influence, the show was a real guilty pleasure phenomenon, spawning a mini-cottage industry of other shows about yelling Italians, and giving rise to myriad spinoffs centered on individual cast members—not to mention inspiring dozens of regional remakes all around the world, including the just-premiered Floribama Shore. Its cultural legacy is both lasting and surprisingly renewable, a fact that is probably best not to dwell on for too long.
Jersey Shore Family Vacation will bring together all of that original cast minus Sammi, an absence that either promises a blessed respite from another rehashing of her on-again-or-who-gives-a-shit romance with Ronnie, or ominously portends a mid-show “surprise” appearance to scream about it some more—but in a newly mature, 30-year-old sort of way. It will also include Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, who is newly sober and still hasn’t been sentenced to prison for tax evasion. So it’s definitely time to round up the old drinking crew and hit the beach, baby!
The existence of the reunion show—though literally nothing else about it—was confirmed with a brief promo, in which the disembodied voice of Snooki brays, “We’re back, bitches” in a tone that will spark whatever the opposite of a Proustian reverie is.
Jersey Shore Family Vacation follows this past summer’s Reunion Road Trip: Return To The Jersey Shore special on E!, which found everyone in a much better place now that they’re not constantly puking rum and cocaine on the beach. It also confirmed that they will nevertheless be yoked together for eternity, consigned to reassemble periodically and reminisce about old fights for our amusement while they—and we—slowly die off. As Snooki says, “Can’t fuckin’ waaaaait.”