There are so many reality shows on TV now that few of them break out and become a pop cultural phenomenon the way that “Survivor” and “Big Brother” and “The Real World” did in their early seasons.
We’ve all become hip to the not-so-hidden manipulations used to jack up the drama on the popular Bravo “Housewives” shows and all of those fallen-celebrity programs on VH1. Too many of the series are just cheaply-produced soap operas with very bad “acting.”
Then, earlier this winter, came “Jersey Shore,” the first of the new breed to get tons of press — including lots of criticism — to the point where non-viewers became aware of the show.
I only saw bits and pieces of the series when it aired on MTV — and immediately sensed the real chemistry between the roommates at a beach house in Seaside Heights last summer. But, I didn’t understand why the show was such a hit until I watched the new “uncensored” season one DVD last week.
Unlike MTV’s “The Real World” which has always assembled a hand-picked group of very different people — obviously designed to strike sparks due to their conflicts — the young people in “Jersey Shore” come from very similar backgrounds.
Snooki and Mike (“The Situation”) and Jenni (“JWOW”) and the others could have easily wound up together in a share house at any beach resort in the country — on their own. They all signed on to the Seaside Heights beach 
house with the same goals in mind — a terrific summer vacation (on MTV’s dime) with an easy job selling T-shirts at a nearby boardwalk shop.
I’m sure there were a lot of backstage shenanigans — by the producers and crew — designed to amp up the drama. But the nine-episode series feels more like an actual documentary than the other reality shows because the 20somethings are achingly “real” working class kids we follow in bars and clubs and in the rambling beach house as they look for good times.
Yes, the “Jersey Shore” group speaks bluntly about sex — and the young men often appear to be looking for trouble when they get loaded — but I doubt that the show is the gross distortion of life at the beach that the Chamber of Commerce and other civic groups claimed it was. For one thing, the Seaside Heights bars we get to know fairly intimately — Karma and The Beachcomber, among them — are packed with kids who look and act just like Snooki et al.
“Jersey Shore” is fun to watch — especially after the nightmarishly screechy Angelina takes off after a few episodes — and we see genuine friendships forming among like-minded people. It’s a much less guilty pleasure than “My Super Sweet 16” or the other reality programming on MTV.
The DVD has an extra disc with a “reunion” special that ran on MTV after the series aired, about 25 minutes of deleted scenes (nothing too juicy), and a very amusing mini-doc in which actor Michael Cera (above, left) gets a “Jersey Shore” makeover.
It seems unlikely that a second season of the show could be anywhere near as entertaining as season one — the cast is too knowing now — but with this vulgar and amusing (and, yes, sometimes touching) crew you never know.
(The “uncensored” DVD of “Jersey Shore” is being released exclusively through the CreateSpace division of Amazon.com, both on disc and online via CreateSpace’s DVD on Demand technology. Visit www.createspace.com for more info.)
