Two out of three is a pretty good average I guess. But that dummy Lamar Odom married the bad looking one...



It is tempting to view “Jersey Shore” or any Kardashian sister as the knell of civilization’s end.

The second season of “Jersey Shore,” which takes place in Miami, is even more popular than the first, and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” is returning on Sunday for a fifth season, carrying in tow a spinoff about publicists, “The Spin Crowd.”

There is no need to panic.

Reality shows that exalt indolent, loud-mouthed exhibitionists may seem like almost biblical retribution for our materialistic, celebrity-obsessed age. But actually, these kinds of series are an extension of a time-honored form of entertainment, one that reaches back to the era of landed gentry, debutantes and social seasons in places like Newport, R.I., or the French Riviera.

More than a century ago, ordinary people avidly followed the follies of the idle rich in the society pages and passenger lists of liners like the Atlantic or the Mauretania. (The maiden voyage of the Titanic was a style story — until it hit the iceberg.)

There were celebrities back then too, and their claims to fame were not so much nobler than those of Kim Kardashian or even Mike, a k a the Situation, of “Jersey Shore.” Women and men made news by spending money frivolously or having grand weddings with millionaires or titled Europeans; they became infamous in lurid sex scandals and even murder cases, as when Harry K. Thaw killed the architect Stanford White in 1906 out of jealousy over White’s affair with his model-actress wife, Evelyn Nesbit.

News judgment, even then, skewed toward entertainment. The New York Herald was the first American newspaper to use the wireless telegraph in 1899 — inventor Guglielmo Marconi was invited to New York to report not the conclusion of the Dreyfus affair or the start of the second Boer war, but the results of a high-society sailing regatta, America’s Cup.

Celebrities of yore wore more clothes and had better manners, but then, as now, they went to a lot of parties and were often famous for being famous.

Television merely invades the process and broadens the social pool. “Jersey Shore” is often condemned, at least by many New Jersey residents, for hitting a new low by elevating the riffraff of tanning salons and sleazy nightclubs. But it’s important to remember that “Jersey Shore” is on MTV, a youth-oriented cable channel that has a hortative streak: series like “Teen Mom” and “If You Really Knew Me” carry a strong “don’t try this at home” message.

So, in a way, does “Jersey Shore.” The antics of Snooki, Ronnie, Vinny and the other housemates are a reality show version of a children’s poem in Gelett Burgess’s “Goops and How to Be Them,” first published in 1900:

The Goops they lick their fingers

and the Goops they lick their knives

They spill their broth on the tablecloth

Oh, they lead disgusting lives!

Bad behavior serves as a warning but succeeds as entertainment.

When they first appeared, the cast members of “Jersey Shore” were a Bart Simpson-ish tonic after the bland chic and relentless blond perfection of “The Hills.” They are loud, vulgar, salon-tanned and gym-bulked numbskulls who drink, brawl, belch and use foul language. This season the housemates have taken on a semblance of work in a Miami ice cream parlor — but it’s a silly gimmick. Their vocation is vacation.

And they have become so entrenched in the vernacular that even President Obama mentioned Snooki in a recent speech. She has smoothed down her “pouf” this season, but for a lingering moment that retro hairstyle was a cultural artifact like Jacqueline Kennedy’s pillbox hat.

Reality shows are staged, scripted and heavily edited, but for some reason there is still a frisson of authenticity behind the artifice: real people seem to have more staying power than established celebrities who are cast in reality shows.

The amateurs who turn into semi-professional actors on “The Bachelorette” keep finding an audience. Dina Lohan, the mother of Lindsay, and Denise Richards, the ex-wife of Charlie Sheen, bombed on their reality shows, mostly because they turned out to be deadly dull, unwilling or unable to tap into their inner sitcom personas, as Ozzy Osbourne did so successfully in his pioneering reality show, “The Osbournes.”

And so, however improbably, have the Kardashians. The women of the family have molded their exotic beauty and blank personalities to fit into comic soap operas, including the spinoff “Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami.”

They deliver dialogue that is so deliciously inane that no “As the World Turns” writer would dare type it. “We have, like, a great relationship,” Kim tells Jonathan Cheban, a publicist-confidant, explaining why she and the football star Reggie Bush broke up. “We just kind of realized it’s not working.”

In Sunday’s season premiere a newly single Kim won’t let people into her new house — a huge and impersonal faux-Mediterranean villa — for fear of scratches or stains. “I’ve worked so hard for this,” she tells her stepfather, Bruce Jenner.

It’s a laughable statement — she is the high priestess of red carpet parasites — except that Kim did make a go of doing almost nothing. She began as a national joke, mocked for having an odalisque figure but no visible talent, and has transformed herself into an international brand and tabloid fixture. Now she is also an executive producer of “The Spin Crowd.”

And that show, about Hollywood bottom-feeders, makes the “Jersey Shore” crowd seem reserved. Jonathan runs his company, Command PR, based on the “Swimming With Sharks” school of management — bullying a young new associate to have collagen lip injections, haranguing female assistants to look even more slutty — if that’s imaginable.

There’s nothing new about coaxing celebrities to promote products; the actress Lillian Russell endorsed Coca-Cola at the turn of the last century. But Jonathan has to persuade a Hollywood hunk to be a spokesman for a line of self-tanning lotions for men.

And the surrealism of show business is what makes this a marketable reality show.

“That sounds sort of in the makeup-world kind of deal — that’s not really me,” Mario Lopez, a host of “Extra,” tells Jonathan. “So I don’t know if it’s really true or authentic to what I am about.

Sleazy but not Originals: NYT