God’s Gift to Women
You can analyze and meta-enable yourself into a fake tan with MTV’s Jersey Shore for all I care. The appeal of that show is one-dimensional no matter how many three-syllable words used to “understand” it. There is another show on MTV though that is unpredictable, tragic, uplifting, poignant and is appealing in many of the deep ways people pretend Jersey Shore to be: Teen Mom. And there is no more tragic a clown than Teen Mom’s lumpy lover and dunderheaded bad father but good guy, Gary.
Deep down inside I think a lot of guys, maybe myself included, are a little more Gary than we would like to admit. Gary is just the realization of all of those qualities the rest of us dudes manage to repress. He’s a bit of what George Costanza would be in real life and removed from the self-conscious fish tank of New York. Slob. Attention-span-less. Dopey. Easily distracted. Temperamental. Longing.
Ultimately though, Gary is a decent romantic and probably a good guy at heart. He just desperately needs a tune-up… like so many of us.