‘Jersey Shore’s’ GTL routine will end, but effects will live on

Like a tan growing pale, “Jersey Shore” is fading into the TV sunset. Thursday marks the beginning of its sixth season — its last.

It began as just another low-budget MTV reality show, with lower expectations, that would chronicle the fist-pumping antics of its ultra-bronzed, ultra-average stars who would be cooped up in a house in Seaside Heights, N.J. Then the series aired in December 2009, and it quickly and curiously morphed into a surprisingly potent pop force that made “Snooki” a household name, turned an unknown cast into late-night punch lines and, ultimately, its title became shorthand for the further dumbing down of American culture.

“Let’s just keep it real, we’ve made a lasting effect,” said Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino during a phone interview. “It will take a number of years to try to forget what we’ve done. We changed the way people view reality TV. We helped changed how reality TV is done.”

QUIZ: Test your ‘Jersey Shore’ vocabulary

Sorrentino, for once, isn’t exaggerating too much. The program, originally planned as a competition-based series intended for VH1, let viewers peep inside the “guido youth” subculture whose hallmarks were late-night boozing and grinding, while sporting perfectly coiffed hair and extremely tan skin.

The show’s novelty and buzz opened the floodgates for imitators across dozens of niche networks desperate to stand out amid the cacophony of reality television. Bravo’s “Shahs of Sunset,” Animal Planet’s “Hillbilly Handfishin’” and even TLC’s “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” all owe a tip of the hat to the “Jersey Shore” kids.

“It proved that you can still surprise this late in the reality game,” said Andy Dehnart, editor of the reality TV news and review site RealityBlurred.com. “It made it interesting to learn about people whose lives are different than our own and made networks less afraid to go outside the box.”

Along with a pair of gritty reality shows, “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom,” the “Jersey Shore” gamble boosted MTV’s ratings at a critical time and helped it find a new pop-culture relevance. The trio of unlikely hits also enabled the network to take on a new identity as it wrapped up an era of celebrating the wealth and excess of pretty people in such shows as “The Hills” and “My Super Sweet 16.”

The first season of “Jersey Shore” averaged 2.7 million viewers and the show would reach 8 million viewers in its third cycle, according to ratings firm Nielsen. Last season it dropped to a still-impressive 5.8 million viewers, and once again ranked as the No. 1 cable series among the 12-34 demographic, as it had been for the previous four runs.

“ ‘Jersey Shore’ breathed life into the channel at a time when we really needed it,” said Jackie French, MTV’s senior vice president of series development and the driving force behind the show “It was bigger than anyone of us ever imagined. It brought a lot of new viewers to the channel. There are people who haven’t watched MTV in a long time but they wanted to watch ‘Jersey Shore’ because they wanted to be in the conversation Friday morning.”

In time, the “Jersey Shore” conversation broadened the English language as well. New words and terms — GTL (gym, tan, laundry), grenades (unattractive females) and smushing (sex) — became part of the youth lexicon.

Fascination for all things Jersey reached beyond American shores, too, as the show aired in nearly170 territories. It’s been one of the top performing series across the network’s international markets, including Australia, Denmark, Singapore and Sweden. (The show even inspired two international versions, “Geordie Shore” in the U.K. and “Gandia Shore” in Spain.)

“I think sometimes you just have to trust your gut as a network and put stuff on the air and really give it a go,” said “Jersey Shore” executive producer SallyAnn Salsano. “Because sometimes things that feel out of left field or a little bit odd is actually your best bet. Look how far this thing went. It’s insane.”

Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, who said she would film herself and post the videos on YouTube in her pre-”Jersey Shore” days, attributes the show’s success to a carefree mentality — which, in her case, included panty-less outings at clubs and sloppy drunken binges.

“We didn’t care,” said Polizzi, who recently graced the cover of People magazine with her newborn baby. “We did us. People weren’t used to that and that’s what helped make it a big deal.”

The show, though, wasn’t wholeheartedly embraced by everyone. Italian American anti-defamation groups lambasted “Jersey Shore” for playing on the worst ethnic stereotypes — a national Italian American organization, UNICO, called it “trash television.” When the show jet-setted to Italy in its fourth season, the cast members were met with outrage by some locals. And a few sponsors, including Domino’s Pizza, pulled ads after the show’s premiere.

Yet, the show continued its climb. And Bob Batchelor, author of “American Pop: Popular Culture Decade by Decade,” said that’s not something to gloss over.

“The success this show achieved is really a reflection on society and how incredibly voyeuristic we are,” said Batchelor, an assistant professor at Kent State University in Ohio. “In one episode, there’s a girl going to the bathroom behind a club bar — how hideous are we that we’re watching this? It really held an ugly mirror up to what people really want to see.”

The culture rubberneckers catapulted the eight unknowns into reality stars whose antics burned up Web gossip sites and were routinely splashed across tabloid magazines. They cashed in on their newfound celebrity, negotiating book and lucrative endorsement deals, and landed movie roles and TV spinoffs. The group was also savvy enough to get a pay raise ahead of the fourth season, one which brought some of the players at least $100,000 per episode.

“Every day is crazier than the last,” said Sorrentino, who most recently made headlines for a stint in rehab. “One day you’re on Leno, the next day you’re flying to Florence, the next day you’re talking to Donald Trump or hanging out with Snoop Dogg. And then everything that wasn’t normal before is beyond normal now.”

That’s part of the problem, Dehnart said — the cast members were victims of their own astonishing success.

“It was such a surprise and so interesting at first,” he said. “But its success just consumed it. Obviously it’s remained a popular show, but things got less interesting. They weren’t the genuine, authentic, real characters who were unlike anyone we had seen on TV anymore.”

French said outside ventures — and adulthood — contributed to the decision to end the show.

“The cast is growing up,” she said. “Snooki has a baby. Jenni [“JWoww” Farley] is engaged … they have outside interests, obviously their lives have changed over the years and they have career opportunities and businesses that they want to move on with. Things are just different.”

The network still retains some of its “Jersey Shore” real estate with the spinoff “Snooki & JWoww” coming back for a second season. (There’s still no word on whether Paul “Pauly D” DelVecchio’s spinoff will return).

QUIZ: Test your ‘Jersey Shore’ vocabulary

The network has other new series in the pipeline, including this month’s premiere of “Underemployed,” which furthers its push toward scripted programs — joining “Awkward,” “Teen Wolf” and “The Inbetweeners.” And a new reality series, “Catfish,” inspired by the 2010 film, will make its debut in November and steers away from twentysomethings shacking up, instead focusing on online relationships.

They have a tough act to follow.

“ ‘Jersey Shore’ set the bar a little bit higher for everybody,” French said. “Everything inevitably gets compared to ‘Jersey Shore,’ and although we’re not trying to re-create it, you still have to look at that and say, ‘Is this a show that is really going to resonate beyond our walls. Is it a show that people are going to talk about the next day? Is it social currency?’”

What about the fate of the “Jersey Shore” cast members once they leave the wood-paneled walls of the shore house?

“We’re going to be stuck with these people for the rest of our natural lives,” Batchelor said.

Sorrentino, who just wrapped filming “Celebrity Big Brother U.K.,” certainly hopes so.

“I love being in front of the camera,” he said.

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