The hugely successful MTV reality show, Jersey Shore, concluded after six seasons in 2012. With a rampant fervor of remakes, reboots, and re-runs, the landscape of movie and TV entertainment just can’t let the past go, though, which has brought us here—to the Jersey Shore Family Vacation show that premiered last night. For those Jwoww, Snooki and Situation stans out there, this was probably a momentous time for your media diet—and the ratings for last night’s episode certainly support that notion of enthusiasm. Jersey Shore, it seems, is still hugely popular nearly six years later.
According to Deadline, the premiere received a 2.96 rating for MTV’s demographic of 18-34-year-olds. The first episode at 8 pm garnered a 2.88 rating with the following episode receiving a bump to 3.03. Now, since we aren’t all Nielsen employees and numbers like that don’t tell us anything, let’s work with what we know—the number of viewers watching the damn thing. Deadline tells us that quite a few people tuned in—2.4 million for the first episode and 2.6 million for the second—to be exact. This officially makes Jersey Shore Family Vacation the most successful unscripted cable series premiere for the aforementioned demographic in six years. The two-hour, global multi-episode premiere—MTV’s first—made a pretty big splash on Twitter, too, with the #JSFamilyVacation hashtag trending for a full seven hours.
These numbers are pretty stunning. In an era where most people in that target demographic are content streaming movies or TV shows on Netflix, this is an awe-inspiring feat. While a huge portion of us are cable-cutters, frustrated with the cost of a subscription and tired of broad-appeal advertisements, it seems like a lot of people still watch actual television.
