Dancing Near the Stars

Profile of “Jersey Shore”‘s Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino. “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.”