Dear Canada,
Greetings from below the border. How's the health care? Yeah, let's change the subject.
Recently, I got a chance to watch the "sizzle reel" for "Lake Shore," your Toronto-based "Jersey Shore" knockoff. Being a "sizzle reel," I can only surmise that it was intended to inflame my passions and titillate my taste for the shirtless barbecue of obnoxiousness. Unfortunately, I feel obliged to inform you that it only sizzled me with anger and disappointment. How could you fuck up a formula this simple?
In lieu of gathering together seven or eight profoundly un-self-aware champions of the same ethnicity, as "Jersey Shore" has done to such great success (and as even "Brighton Beach," the samizdat Russian bootleg, has wisely elected to do), you've filled the house with people of different backgrounds. There's Sibel the Turk; Anni Mei the Vietnamese; Tommy Hollywood the Czech; Robyn the Jew; Salem the Lebanese; Downtown D the Albanian; and so on. (There's also Joey the Italian, who, rather than self-identifying as a guido, wears a construction helmet with "#1 WOP" written on it. Apparently he's attending a costume party circa 1918.)
Let's leave aside the undoubtedly pressing issue that many of these people seem devoid of personality (not to mention the vesuvian flagrancy that inhabits the cast of "Jersey Shore" like the Holy Spirit) and emptily opportunistic. Let's leave aside the dramatic issue of there being, it seems, little reason for any of them to engage in endearingly trivial drama about inclusion or exclusion from Chicken Cutlet Night. Let's even leave aside the fact that calling someone "the Vietnamese" or "the Jew" makes you sound like Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino."
You just don't get "Jersey Shore." You don't get why it's simultaneously entertaining, compelling and terrifying, why it's adored and demonized in equal measure. "Jersey Shore" is not about ethnic differences; it's about ethnic sameness. It's not about the zany, unlikely shenanigans that happen when "a Turk, a Czech and a Jew" walk into a house and rub together in forced cohabitation, but about the mind-bogglingly expectable shenanigans that happen when guidos of the purest breed (not genetically, but culturally) are multiplied in an isolated enclosure.
When Snooki refers to her ideal man as a "gorilla juicehead," she unwittingly alludes to the show's entire structure: "Jersey Shore" is set up like the primate house at the Bronx Zoo. Not everyone bouncing around in that house is the same kind of monkey, but it's their similarities that provide entertainment value to the idle spectator, not to mention self-reassurance. Unless we choose to identify — and sometimes it's hard to resist getting in one of those cabs — the show works by encouraging us to look in on an enclave of contiguous difference.
Call it whatever you want — the virtual ghettoization of Italian-Americans, the best show on TV or something strangely alluring in between. Whatever the case, you, Canada, clearly don't have a handle on it. So, here's my advice: find an ethnicity that we don't have, and make a show about them. Eskimos seem like the logical choice. Get the most proudly, obnoxiously Eskimo people you can find and put 'em in an igloo full of walrus blubber. But don't pretend for a moment that your little ethnic melting pot is in any way comparable to our single-course meal of sausage and peppers.
Love, Matt.
P.S.: Thanks for Justin Bieber.
