The first season of Jersey Shore Family Vacation (or the seventh season of Jersey Shore, depending on your perspective) has excelled at taking a single event and stretching it out into an entire episode’s worth of genuinely entertaining content.
While creative editing certainly plays a role, the cast deserves most of the credit for filling the downtime with lol-worthy capering and quotables.
The crew clicks like few other casts in the history of reality television, and when they’re firing on all cylinders, it’s like watching the guido Golden State Warriors in action.
Take last night’s episode, for example.
Mike popped the question to Lauren Pesce — which we already knew was gonna happen — and Ronnie went full goth teen, basically lying in bed for the entire episode.
That’s it.
And yet somehow, it was a pretty engaging (no pun intended) hour of television.
Mike recruited the whole crew to assist with his proposal, which was definitely the right move from the viewers’ perspective.
It’s great that the Sitch has turned his life around, but we don’t tune in to Shore for an hour of a tee-totaling middle-aged dude waxing philosophical, ya know?
Some questionable decisions were made (the all-white engagement outfits for the guys; loading Lauren up on booze before she goes out to dinner with her relatively newly-sober boyfriend), but in the end, it all worked out.
Mike and Lauren got engaged, in the sort of genuinely amusing scene we don’t typically associate with Jersey Shore.
“You’re my best friend, my college sweetheart, my better half. You make me a better person,” Sorrentino told Pesce.
“Please make me the happiest man on Earth. Will you please marry me?”
The couple stated that they plan to work on making little baby Sitches as soon as they tie the knot.
Here’s hoping Sorrentino can stay out of prison in order to be there for his family.
And that’s not our way of slipping in Ronnie-esque dig at the Sitch.
Mike surely made some bad decisions, but he seems to finally be on the right path, and we hope the judge in his case will take that into consideration.
Speaking of Ronnie, we guess he had a premonition about just how ugly his relationship with Jen Harley would get, because dude is seriously bummed about the prospect of going back to the real world.
In the same way that the original Shore captured the carefree frivolity of your twenties, Family Vacation serves as a reminder that your thirties are loaded with stress and obligations that are never far from your mind, even on vacay.
Fortunately, Pauly D is always there to lighten the load with some amusing catchphrases.
