Image Credit: MTV
The final episode of Jersey Shore – the highest-rated series in MTV history; the first important artifact of the Meme Generation era, when catchphrases and plot points became hashtag fodder; the show that accidentally assembled a cast that amounted to a reality-character Trope-Superteam, recalling that old Umberto Eco line about Casablanca, “the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion,” except that these clichés were real people before they disintegrated into self-parody; a show that, in fact, seemed to argue that the whole process of “growing up” in America has been replaced by a process of active self-parody, as if the rise of social networking has transformed us into a nation of brands hunting for recognition, as if we have all become TV characters on a long-running sitcom that stopped being good seven years ago but still scores high in a key advertising demo, as if we’re all trapped in the ninth season of Friends when no one was funny and everyone was pregnant but at least they all had better hair and more expensive clothes — was pretty boring. READ FULL STORY »
