Guilty Pleasure

Whether I'm laughing at them or with them, the Jersey Shore is hilarious and I'm not afraid to admit I watch it. A lot of people turn their nose up to reality tv, and I used to be one of them. Then the Jersey Shore came, yes it is mindless I know, but it's like a car crash and I can't look away. Alex Pappademas of GQ breaks it down perfectly below.

Then something weird happened: America got to know these kids, and America grew to love them a little. "Pauly D" DelVecchio, the DJ with the bombproof Gotti Boys tape-up, turned out to be hilariously funny; Jenni "JWOWW" Farley turned out to be a gruff den mother with a heart as big as her implants; Snooki turned out to be a goddamn national treasure.Sure, they all got shithouse drunk and screamed bleeped curse words in one another's faces and flashed their thongs and referred to girls who didn't meet their rigorous physical-attractiveness standards as "grenades" and generally embodied every negative stereotype associated with Italian-American culture you can embody without murdering someone for control of a gambling syndicate. But they never seemed less than totally genuine, something you can't say about the last ten years of Real World fuckbots, and they lived, for the most part, by a bro code, and they kept each other in line, and they always said grace at dinner. They were less like the Sopranos and more like the Simpsons—irascible cartoons with skin tones not found in nature, accused of contributing to the decline of family values while actually reaffirming those values. And over the course of two seasons, they've grown into the most charismatic characters on TV. Read More