Jersey Shore Exposed as Scripted Drama

By Natasha Imperioli

SEASIDE HEIGHTS- Stunned television watchers across America mourned the loss of one of their great train wreck pleasures this week when MTV’s smash hit Jersey Shore was revealed to be a scripted drama rather than a spontaneous reality show. Executive producer Sallyann Salsano said she was “embarrassed” that the news came out, but that she never expected the show to achieve such massive popularity.

The first hints of malfeasance occurred weeks ago when one of the show’s breakout stars Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi was spotted emerging from a Manhattan Barnes and Noble with a copy of Camus’ L’Etranger. Curious onlookers subsequently asked the waitress at the next door café about Snooki’s lunch, and the waitress said that she uncharacteristically ordered an arugula and fennel salad with dressing on the side. The conditions became even more dubious when the waitress described Snooki as “personable, engaging, and polite.”
The house of cards began to crumble when a private investigator caught wind of these facts and ran a thorough background check on Snooki. His search revealed that the self-titled Princess of Poughkeepsie is actually a 27-year old actress from Grand Rapids, Michigan named Nicole Huntington. Huntington studied drama at NYU and wallowed in obscurity before being offered the part of a fat airhead with stunningly little self-awareness by producers at MTV. She claims that she prepared for the role by eating paint chips and observing the behavior of Long Island teenagers outside a strip mall on Friday nights.

Perhaps the show’s most identifiable character, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino came clean shortly after Huntington was busted by the private investigators. Sorrentino, who was born in Sacramento under the name Michael Verba and is half Indian, said that the members of the cast did not anticipate gaining such notoriety and that they felt trapped by the characters. “The show was supposed to fill a time slot on the cheap for a year and get everyone something to put on their reel. When it became the most popular show in America, we realized that we couldn’t just tell everyone that it was a fake. They started to believe that our scripted nonsense was the way people really live in New Jersey. They were laughing at us because they thought we were so stupid, but I guess the joke was on them.”

Verba went on to explain that much of the show was ad libbed, but that the storylines and plot points were discussed at length in production meetings every morning before shooting. He claimed that the show’s head writer, Daniel Feldstein, is responsible for most of the catchphrases that the show introduced into popular culture, including “GTL” (short for Gym-Tanning-Laundry) and “grenade” (an insulting term for an overweight girl).

Many fans of the show wondered why Season 2 of the show did not include any new concepts of storylines that had not already played out in Season 1. In fact, the writers realized that the characters they created could truly only sustain about 10 episodes before their shallow, two-dimensional reality became redundant and predictable to even the least inquisitive viewer. As a result, Season 2 blatantly ripped off Season 1’s catchphrases in uncreative ways- such as “landmine” as a takeoff on the more popular and clever “grenade”- and fell into a holding pattern of repeating the same storylines verbatim. For instance, even though the writers of the show floated the rumor that Ronnie and Sammy ended their tumultuous on-camera romance between the seasons, when they realized that there was no genuine conflict in the second season, they reignited the story and borrowed heavily from Season 1’s scripts to create drama between the two characters. Many viewers complained that the on-again/off-again romance was unbelievable in the way that it incessantly repeated itself; the writers have since conceded that they only set up the story that way because they didn’t have any better ideas.

The revelation that the show and its drama are entirely scripted explains many confusing details about the progression of the characters. Despite several reported “arrests” of cast members for offenses ranging from aggravated assault to public intoxication, there were no court or police records for any of them in the state of New Jersey. Furthermore, every cast member remained in the house in spite of the supposed legal trouble. The fact that the legal issues were manufactured explains why there were never any repercussions for any of the cast members. Similarly, when Huntington was “punched” in a bar by a man in the first season, there were no charges or lawsuits brought against the instigator even though his transgressions were caught on tape. As it turns out, the extra who threw the “punch” was actually a lighting tech who they pulled onto the set because they thought he would be unrecognizable. When it was discovered that he was credited in some of the earlier episodes, his face was blurred out for every airing of the “punch” after its debut.

[RIGHT- Huntington allegedly "arrested" by two actors portraying police officers.]

Jersey Shore’s tumultuous second season has called into question the show’s future. MTV has already shot footage for a third season, but the network has not decided whether to air the show in the same “reality” pretense as the first two seasons. Market analysts have indicated that the show may not be in as much trouble as the network believes, because most of the demographic who watches the show religiously also thinks that Barack Obama is a Muslim and would go to war over the Team Jacob/Team Edward feud. Their only fear is that Glen Beck takes up the “Jersey Shore Conspiracy” as a form of left wing Nazi-esque propaganda, as anything less would probably fail to get anyone’s attention.