Given that my alarm goes off at 7:40 every morning I was ecstatic to find that I hadn’t missed the big news that @DJPaulyD was tweeting would be broadcast on this morning’s Today Show. I had just enough time to rub the sleep out of my eyes before I tuned into NBC to see JWoww, Vinny, Sammi, the Situation, Snooki and Pauly D sitting down with Meredith Viera. Snooks and the Situation didn’t seem too worse for wear having flown across the country overnight after walking the Grammy Red Carpet, but Ronnie was noticeably absent (the Situation joked that he was so excited with their big news that he slept in).
Their big news turned out to be what we already know – they’re coming back for a second season (fist pump!) and they don’t yet know where filming will take place other than that it will be a warm locale, and it could begin as early as March.
Viera wasn’t going to let them slide with just announcing their news, however. She asked them about their “Friends style hold out” for higher salaries (the Situation said he felt that they as a cast felt they were worth more money and should be granted such) and she made them address some of the controversy surrounding the show. While she admitted she hadn’t seen the first season, she’s read the criticism saying that there is nothing redeeming about the show whatsoever, and the cast are nothing but beefed up, uneducated, hair-gelled idiots but that it is impossible to look away.
JWoww responded that she has two bachelors degrees and owns two businesses and Vinny and Sammi are college graduates, while Snooki is working towards a degree so it’s unfair to call them uneducated. And Vinny reminded us that he recently took the LSAT and he doesn’t even wear hair gel so that’s untrue as well.
Pauly D (the old man at 28, as Viera called him) spoke up that there’s something special about the show because they’re raw and real and there is nothing else on TV that really shows a group of young people doing what young people do when they go out on TV so people are responding to that in a positive way. The 4 million viewers that watched the finale – the highest rated show in MTV’s history – can’t be wrong.
Viera then questioned whether or not they really were real or whether their personas on the show were an exaggeration of themselves or a character they became.
Snooki stated that they aren’t characters that MTV created. They’re really being themselves. To which Viera asked if they were representative of Italian Americans and presenting them in a bad light. The entire cast said no, they weren’t representing anyone other than themselves and the Situation added – surprisingly eloquently – that there are a lot of naysayers out there who say that what they’re doing is offensive, but he wants to find a 40 or 50 year old person who can sit back and say that they never went out to bars or tried to pick up a girl when they were younger. The only thing different with the Jersey Shore cast is that they have a camera following them around as they do it.
Perhaps the most telling part of the interview happened when Viera asked Sammi point blank if she and Ronnie were still together. Sammi hedged and said that they were both happy, but Viera pushed a little harder to get an answer and Sammi avoided the question again by saying that she and Ronnie were good. Could it be that the reunion show break up was real?
But the best news of the day was that Angelina wasn’t mentioned at all! It seems doubtful she’ll rejoin the show as a cast member for Season Two!
Hairpoof is having technical problems embedding the video, but the entire interview can be found on NBC’s Web site here. We’re also looking for some screencaps because our computer hates us at the current moment and isn’t letting us upload the ones we’ve made ourselves.
Photo credit: Tom Briglia/PhotoGraphics Photography
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