For season two of MTV's televised taste vacuum that is Jersey Shore I did weekly writeups here on Blogtown out of a real passion for trash TV and a burning need to muse about this show somewhere and unpack all the feelings it makes me feel. (My friends = not interested) The first season of the show was a huge hit and honestly one of the most addictive and off-putting shows I've ever been obsessed with. It was magic to watch!

But season two was different. Season two was ugly. The coked-up fights, the rampant misogyny, the gutter-level self-esteems... none of it was fun anymore! The naive, outsized senses of self-entitlement that made the cast so lovable and laughable had become an ugly self-fulfilling prophecy. My weekly updates were suddenly a chore and, ultimately, a vampiric task that left me hollow and depressed every Tuesday. This is how I closed out my last one:

Honestly, if I have any other final thoughts for this season they are sad thoughts. All I know is that months ago I started laughing at these losers on TV, enjoying the contrast between their disproportionately large egos and general worthlessness. Somewhere along the line I became the loser and they all became multimillionaires. Isn't it ironic that those egos seem totally justifiable now? Millions of people like me have spent hours feeding the Jersey Shore Neilsen ratings with our rapt attention, massaging our own self-superiority. But here I sit on the poverty level while somewhere DJ Pauly D is getting blown in the back of his Trans Am that's being transported by private jet to a secret island for rich people. The Guidos have won, everyone, and we handed it to them.

Now I'm not gonna start updating weekly again - I learned my awful lesson - but I will say this: holy crap is this show fun again! I don't mind the Jersey Shore clowns getting paid millions as long as they're funny clowns! Yes, it's backwards that Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino makes more money than both Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama but I am content with that fact now that season three has begun.

Why after the jump.

So far, season three has changed my mind fundamentally about one thing: I used to lament the fact that these awful people were famous for being losers; now, I love it. Through all of the red carpet interviews and threatened spin-offs surrounding season two it was unclear which side of the fame/infamy line the Jersey Babies would end up on. Where we really so morally bankrupt as a country to worship these calves of spray-tanned gold instead of... real people who contribute to society??

I should have had more trust in America. Season three has been a delicious schadenfreude sundae proving that, no matter how rich these people get, they will always be losers. And how do professional losers contribute to society? By giving us someone to laugh at!

In the weird meta world of a post-Jersey Shore Jersey shore the cast members are now being forced to hawk t-shirts with their own stupid phrases ("Don't fall in love at the Jersey shore!") to rubber-necking tourists - a preview of the rest of their lives at the end of the slide. It's become clear that buttload of money in one of the Jersey Babies' bank accounts just means they'll be pulling out more expensive weaves and drenching their personalized Ed Hardy tees with the half-digested remains of finer alcohol.

Even better, the quirks they tried to fashion into shticks have become full-grown problems and personality flaws, each designed to make you feel better about your own life: "Snooki is a tipsy party girl" has become "Snooki is a full-blown alcoholic who offers to lick dirty backroom carpet for a sip of beer at ten in the morning"; "The Situation is a player" has become "The Situation is a womanizer who will go to whiny, comic lengths to have his steroid-shriveled penis validated night after night" "Sammi is a bitch" has become "Sammi acts like a bitch because she is an overgrown child hardwired to alienate anyone with her best interests in mind".

No show - not Hoarders, not Intervention, not nothin' - compares to the thrill of this trainwreck. Because, in the end, the Dalai Lama is the Dalai Lama and Barack Obama is Barack Obama (rhymes!) but JWOWW is the girl who peed behind an empty bar on national TV and rinsed it down with a seltzer gun. And she always will be. These are your court jesters, America. Live like kings!

Is anyone else still watching this thing? Is it just me and a bunch of thirteen-year-olds with bad taste in role models? TSW, are you out there?