Reality TV is eating itself with the return of Jersey Shore and Trading Spaces

[TMC]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/a...es-reboot.html

The return of Trading Spaces on Saturday and Jersey Shore tonight with a Family Vacation season will test whether two relics of a naiver time in reality television history can hold up with an audience that is even more self-aware, says Jon Caramanica. "The reality television of the 2000s was a proving ground and a wide-open playing field, a thing you could graduate from to do better things, emotionally or professionally," he says. "Those stars — of the docudrama hall-of-fame series Jersey Shore and the standard-setting home renovation show Trading Spaces — arrived as neophytes and left as savvy instacelebs, beneficiaries of the early wave of reality king- and queen-making. But as the end of the 2010s approaches, reality TV has become an ouroboros, so self-referential and saturated that opportunities for advancement — or growth, or shock — have winnowed. It has become its own career path, and its innovations are slowing."

ALSO:

• Jersey Shore changed reality TV for the better, and it's remarkable how well Family Vacation holds that up
  Jersey Shore stars realized their fortunes are linked, whether they like it or not
  Nothing has changed on Jersey Shore Family Vacation, but the reunion feels like hanging with old friends
  How Jersey Shore killed the Guido aesthetic
  Read an oral history of Jersey Shore