by Sergei Tsimberov
Special Barrelhouse Jersey Shore Season 2 Correspondent

Editor’s Note: Mike here. Just a few short months ago, I devoted many brain-hours to recapping episodes of Jersey Shore, all for your my own amusement. With Season 2 on the horizon, I’m turning over the reins to my friend and fellow writer Sergei Tsimberov, who will be your tour guide as the guidos and guidettes take their clown show on the road to Miami Beach. Sergei lives in Brooklyn, he’s an Aquarius, and he enjoys long walks on Brighton Beach (he also doesn’t mind at all when I make fun of his Russian heritage). Take it away, Sergei!

In late January 2010, when the last episode of MTV’s Jersey Shore aired, this country was a more innocent and pastoral place which had little inkling of the drumbeat of woes that would soon befall it. Well, not really, everything was already pretty fucked, actually, but at least we had the hormone-and-Jager-Bomb fueled cretinism of the Jersey Shore gang to shepherd us through the first part of a long and indifferent winter. But then, as suddenly as they’d appeared, they were gone (actually, probably not true either, because MTV, milking the franchise like it’s their job, which it is, also apparently aired something called Jersey Shore: After Hours, as well as Jersey Shore: Reunion, neither of which I watched, because c’mon, there’s only so much that even I can take), like a carnival that packs up its tents in the middle of the night and moves on to the next town, leaving us with little but questions.

The first question was whether or not we’d see them again at all. Apparently, even before Season 1 finished airing, the cast was engaged in a protracted contract dispute over – well, I’m not sure, actually, because eight months is a long time on the Internet, and I don’t feel like digging through page after page of Google results from celebrity gossip magazines; that having been said, one such magazine, named OK! (it’s unclear whether the name is meant to signal enthusiasm or resignation), informs me that the dispute was settled with every cast member agreeing to be paid $10,000 an episode.

I’m not sure why Viacom even bothered to haggle over this, since a) it is, in the grand scheme of things, not a lot to spend on a show which, given its ratings, is more or less a license to print money and b) MTV needs to firm up the franchise before the inevitable deluge of knockoffs arrives. Not particularly subtle Jersey Shore imitations are already in various stages of production, one featuring Koreans in Los Angeles and another my own Slavic brothers and sisters in my own Brooklyn, which I sort of regret not auditioning for. It can’t be long before the iteration of JS we’re watching features, I don’t know, Finnish-American kids drinking a lot and behaving poorly in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (I would probably watch that too, actually) so Viacom would be wise to cash in while the cashing in is good.

The same OK! article quotes The Situation as noting, “I believe that the cast we have right now is irreplaceable and once you find that magic, it is hard to replace,” a statement that somehow manages to be both self-contradictory and absolutely true. For me, it’s more like blowing up the moon with nuclear weapons, or moving to Los Angeles – sure, maybe you could do it, but why would you ever want to? You wouldn’t.

That settled, we’re left with the more existential question of how Jersey Shore will work now that the kids went and got some fame in them; will it, in fact, at all be the Jersey Shore we’ve come to know and gape at in amazement/horror/incredulity? When Season 1 was being filmed, the gang was simply a few out of the thousands of guidos and guidettes hanging out and making bad life decisions in Seaside Heights that summer, made distinctive only by the fact that they were, inexplicably, being followed around by a camera crew. Now they’re real for-real Celebrities; JWOWW has launched her own clothing line (called, in what I think is a commendably honest branding decision, “Filthy Couture”), and Snooki has a third more Twitter followers than Sarah Palin (one wonders what the extent of the overlap is.). The fear is obvious: that the Situation et al. will cease to be what they are and instead merely act like what we expect them to be, becoming, eventually, a tired simulacrum of themselves.

But is that fear well-founded? The premiere of Season 2 is still days away, but what we do have for now is the trailer. Let’s watch:

Basically, the answer seems to be: uh, no, not really, because the thing is that it’s really not that hard to close the gap between what you are and what people expect of you when both of those basically entail just getting drunk a lot and making out with hot strangers at the club. The only substantive differences from last season are that Ronnie seems to have progressed to making out with two hotties at the same time, and now the club is not in Seaside Heights but in Miami (an uninformed viewer who has nothing but the above trailer to go on could be forgiven for believing that the actual place name is “Miami Bitch”), so … well, I’m not sure what. Maybe there are more Cubans, or something? Other notes:

1. Angelina returns, though it’s not clear for how long. Angelina fascinates me, in a way – what must it be like to be the only person to have been too morally bankrupt to be on the Jersey Shore? Isn’t that sort of like, I don’t know, being thrown out of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF for hating Whitey too much? And what was it like to return to relative obscurity and watch the other seven become famous? These questions will be answered, maybe, before the whole thing devolves into volleys of slap-fighting and hair-pulling, which is the form that inter-female conflict resolution inevitably takes on JS.

2. The Situation, with the help of DJ Pauly D, seems intent on forcing the “grenade” catchprase into the vernacular, a questionable move for someone whose very name is a catchphrase unto itself. Also, interestingly, the origin of the expression seems to trace back to this scene in the 2000 independent romantic comedy Whipped, although some doubt is cast on this theory by the fact that The Situation does not watch things like independent romantic comedies, because they are for fags.

3. They seem to have gotten rid of the whole gimmick of the cast having to work a “day job,” or at least I hope they did. This may be because no one has a day job in Miami Bitch, but more likely because this was, at least in my opinion, the least successful part of Season 1, since for everyone but the Situation working at the Shore Store mostly just seemed to entail standing around hungover and bored. Also, my theory is that the larger significance of Jersey Shore is that it’s something like a chronicle of our collective unrealized youth, that is, though we laugh at the guidos, we secretly also want to be famous and well-paid for … well, for getting drunk a lot and making out with hot strangers at the club. And I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that my unrealized youth did not involve standing around in some shitty t-shirt store, folding up a JERSEY SHORE + SINGLE = TROUBLE babydoll t-shirt over and over.

4. I like that Ronnie’s Nixonian side comes out when confronted with his perennial Sammi problems (1:32). Richard M. himself would probably be better remembered by history if the “when the President does it, it’s not illegal” quote was usually played over a video clip of him making out with two chicks at once.

5. Vinny, apparently, has sex with Snooki, which, if I recall correctly, actually makes her the last to connect into the nexus of bodily-fluid exchange that is the JS house. However, this may also be a deliberate deception based on some selective editing on MTV’s part, so let’s not cross this bridge by speculating about it until we come to that particular Snooki-fucking bridge.

6. The four seconds from 2:06 to 2:10 may be what television itself was invented for in the first place.

Sadly, 2:10 is also about all we have, for now, and 2:10 is far too short to contain the hopes and dreams I have — indeed, that we all have — for Season 2. Thankfully, our collective unrealized youth, the one in which we are much more orange and stupid, resumes on July 26.