‘Jersey Shore’ Vs. the State of New Jersey

Hosts

Alan SiegelAlan Siegel

About the episode

Summary

• On December 3, 2009, Jersey Shore premiered on MTV. The reality show’s premise was pretty simple: Drop a bunch of Italian American 20-somethings from the East Coast into Seaside Heights, New Jersey, for the summer. The wildly popular series introduced the country to a preposterously entertaining subculture unknown to most people. 

  What you may not remember about the series is that it caused a wave of backlash that washed all the way into the governor’s office. On the show’s 15th anniversary, “The Jersey Shore vs. The State of New Jersey”—which is available now on The Ringer Reality TV Podcast feed and excerpted below—tells the story of this phenomenon. 

• 0:39

  When I think of New Jersey’s contributions to American pop culture, three things come to mind: Sinatra, Springsteen, and The Sopranos. 

  But if you grew up in the 2000s, there’s a fourth S you might remember. Someone who was ubiquitous for at least half a decade. Someone with a big personality and even bigger hair. That’s right: I’m talking about Snooki.

  Her real name is Nicole Polizzi. But on screen she went by her childhood nickname. She was the biggest star on one of the biggest reality shows ever. In 2011, eight and a half million people watched the premiere of the third season of Jersey Shore. At the time, it was the highest-rated TV episode in the history of the network. 

   

• 1:39

  “I don’t think anyone really, like, saw how Jersey people are,” Polizzi says. “I just feel like the rest of the world had no idea. So I think that’s why people were so intrigued. The big hair, the tans, the accent. I feel like people were obsessed with it.” 

  MTV let the cast members cook: figuratively and literally. They spent their days making sausage and peppers—and bronzing themselves to a crisp. They also squeezed in working out and cleaning their clothes.

  One cast member, named Mike Sorrentino, explained it like this back in Season 1. You might remember him by his nickname: The Situation. “GTL, baby. Gym, tan, laundry.” 

• 2:32

  GTL wasn’t the only phrase the show introduced us to. Before Jersey Shore, most Americans had never heard of “blowouts,” “smushing,” and “beating up the beat.” And they probably didn’t have the signature word of the show in their vocabulary: “guido.” 

  Guido means different things to different people. To some, it’s a term of endearment. To others, it’s a straight-up slur. Among Italian Americans, it’s also a pretty common first name. 

  So what, exactly, is a guido? 

  Basically, a stereotypical middle-class Italian American man. Big arms, hair product, gold chains. And performatively macho. Think Randy Savage–level macho.

   

• 3:17

  The word “guido” was thrown around a lot on Jersey Shore. One of the executive producers of Jersey Shore was quite familiar with the term. Her name is Pam LaLima. Pam grew up in Queens in an Italian American family. When she was working on another reality show near Los Angeles, she remembers joking about guidos. Her coworkers didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

  “They’re all like, ‘What’s a guido?’ And we’re like, ‘What do you mean? How do you not know what a guido is?’” LaLima says. “Like, nobody had heard of this. We just thought that the whole world knew about guidos.”

  It’s safe to say that the Jersey Shore cast didn’t find the word offensive. Polizzi even told me as much. “So we were all guidos and guidettes, so it was a lifestyle at that time,” she says. “So 2006 to 2009 when the show started, it was a big thing in MySpace. You’d be a part of these guido and guidette clubs and you know you would meet up with people and go to DJs and that was our lifestyle.”  

• 4:21

  Pauly D., who was the show’s resident spiky-haired DJ, says as much in “Beat Dat Beat.” That’s his rap song.

  Being a guido is a way of life
  I don’t represent all Italians
  I represent myself 

  The Jersey Shore crew were proud to be themselves. They loved being Italian. And they didn’t all look like telegenic Hollywood stars. In a way, that was a radical choice.

  “I think that we were the unglamorous side of reality,” LaLima says. “We didn’t do hair and makeup for interviews. They were who they were. We really did film 24/7. We saw everything. We saw them at their worst, and their literally ugliest moments, of like, passed out after a night of drinking. I just think that was it. I think it was really real.”

• 5:18

  Jersey Shore wasn’t really about anything beyond friendship, boozy fun, and the occasional fist fight. But for a reality show, it felt authentic. At least that’s what the creators thought. 

  But not everyone agreed. It made media critics angry. To them, Jersey Shore was flat-out anti-Italian American. Entertainment Weekly called it “offensive.” NPR asked whether it was “racist.”  

  And even The New York Times chimed in with this headline: “Discussing That Word That Prompts Either a Fist Pump or a Scowl.”
  
  That word was guido. Naturally, Italian American groups accused the show of promoting stereotypes. “We find this program alarming, in that it attempts to make a direct connection between ‘guido culture’ and Italian American identity,” said Joseph Del Raso, then the president of the National Italian-American Foundation. “‘Guido’ is widely viewed as a pejorative term and reinforces negative stereotypes.” 

  For a little while at least, criticism of the show did start to affect its bottom line. Domino’s Pizza, American Family Insurance, and Dell Computers all pulled ads from Jersey Shore. UNICO National, another Italian American group, called for Jersey Shore to be canceled. 

• 21:11

  And so did New Jersey’s Italian American Legislative Caucus. The chairman was Senator Joseph F. Vitale. He even sent a letter to MTV’s parent company. “The image of young Italian Americans conducting themselves in a disrespectful and inappropriate manner at a summer home on the Shore may make for good ratings,” he wrote, “but it’s a fabrication that damages our state and cultural reputations…”

  The show rubbed the local tourism industry the wrong way, too. Officials claimed that it painted New Jersey’s most popular summer vacation spot in an ugly light. 

  Even the governor was worried that the show was causing bad press. Chris Christie took office in January 2010, at the height of Jersey Shore mania. He doesn’t remember the first time he saw the show. But when we talked this spring, he told me that one thing about it annoyed him the most: there were eight original cast members. Seven of them were not from New Jersey.

• 6:24

  “We’re getting associated with this group of knuckleheads, to be nice,” Christie tells me. “And they’re not even from here, they’re all from Staten Island or other parts of New York City. So that’s the fun I used to have with it. It was like, I don’t recognize these people not from here. They’re making money off of us and God bless them, that’s great. But it really has nothing to do with New Jersey.” 

  Christie even used to joke with the governor of New York about the cast. “I used to kid [Andrew] Cuomo all the time that I was going to give them back,” he says. “I’d say, ‘Come on, I’m giving them back. They’re yours. Let’s call it ‘Staten Island instead of Jersey Shore.’ But if it had done that, not as many people would’ve watched it and it wouldn’t have been as interesting.”
  

  Never one to keep his opinions to himself, Christie let his feelings about the show’s cast be known. “Sparring with them wasn’t fun,” he says. “Sparring with them was kind of like sparring with people with no arms. But it was like part of the job was dealing with that particular issue at that time, and so OK, let’s go.”

  The feeling was mutual. “Chris Christie’s a moron,” Polizzi says. 

  Unintentionally, the feud highlighted issues that we’re still arguing about today. Representation in the media and regional identity. Even though everyone’s anger and fake tans have faded away, there’s still a lot to learn from the battle between the Jersey Shore and the State of New Jersey. 

  And that’s what this episode is about: How the war on The Shore changed America forever. 

  This excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity.