We Went Back to the ‘Jersey Shore’ House With the Cast, 15 Years Later

The Jersey Shore house has its own special scent.

Like all old beach houses–especially those with shag carpeting –there’s a tinge of mustiness, salt water, and sunscreen. This beach house in Seaside Heights also carries a whiff of nights best forgotten.

They can’t be forgotten, however, since millions have seen episodes chronicling them. New fans have caught on from TikTok.

The Jersey Shore house, the setting for MTV‘s highest-rated show ever, remains mostly the same from when the cast exploded on the scene in 2009. It’s a museum to the time of GTL (gym-tan-laundry), the quacking duck phone, and sheets that were never changed.

Yes, that is true. They all confirmed it.

The OGs save Pauly, who was en route from his home in Las Vegas, gathered at the Seaside Heights house to mark the 15th anniversary of the series that brought Guido and Guidette culture to the world.

“I’m proud of standing the test of time,” says Jenni “JWoww” Farley. “I would never think in a million years I would be back here. I can’t believe it’s been 15 years, and they still like us.”

Since the network was not commemorating the anniversary, SallyAnn Salsano, the mastermind behind the series and its many spinoffs, came up with an idea. Salsano can always be counted on to come up with another idea.

The day after we met, she planned to hold a Jersey Shore awards show hosted by Nick Turturro that will air on next season’s Jersey Shore Vacation on MTV. Some of the inherently Jersey Shore categories: Best fight, best quote, and best note.

On a cold morning, Salsano took an hour to chat with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed to reflect on her career and how she made this show a phenomenon. She relaxes in a bedroom that Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and JWoww once shared. It’s bare-bones furnishings, with a boardwalk-shop serape serving as a bedspread.

Salsano wears a black hoodie featuring what looks like the Gucci emblem but instead spells out “Gnocchi.”

“When this show premiered, someone asked me, ‘Are you making fun of the kids?’” Salsano recalls. “No, I lived at home until I was 25. All of that emulated my childhood.”

She understands Jersey Shore on a cellular level. Growing up in Long Island–her production company, 495, is named after the Long Island Expressway–Salsano rented a beach house like this with four friends when she was 21. They had one $19 lamp and carried it from room to room for light.

Salsano envisioned a series set in a house where anything could go on during the week, but Sunday dinner was sacred. “No matter who’s fighting, come Hell or high water, we eat,” she says. “We’re Italian.”

Salsano regularly feeds the crew, who has stuck with her through it all, and the cast. That’s just who she is, asking everybody if they’re hungry, cooking for anyone. The daughter of a New York sanitation worker, she has no airs.

“When we first started, I was looking for a shore house and everyone was showing us mansions with granite counters,” Salsano says. Her concept ran more to cheap paneling and shag carpeting everywhere-including the bathroom.

On a cold morning, Salsano walks through this house she knows so well, explaining that her dad made the blue-and-green stained-glass lampshade over the table. The duck phone came from a thrift store in Tom’s River. The beanbag chairs and the mini fridge–where Snooki once stuck her ass after returning from the tanning bed–are still there. And there is still no TV.

“People watching TV is not great television,” Salsano explains the show’s ban on sets. “And you have to clear everything.”

And so, the cast worked for hourly wages in a T-shirt store, lived in the house rent-free, and the camera took it all in. Of course, this wasn’t the first unscripted show where strangers moved in together. Real World began in 1992. But this made the cast celebrities. How they were chosen and why it all worked is because of Salsano.

So many reality shows typecast for the villain, the hero, the hot one. On Jersey Shore, Salsano says, “They have all been the hero. They have all been the villain. Sometimes shows don’t let you get out of that.”

“The fact that I never made a docuseries is why this show is the way it is,” Salsano says. “Scenes on the cutting-room floor of other shows are on our show. We told stories of what made them most loveable.”

For the record, Salsano is not a failed director. She is successful at exactly what she wanted to do: produce unscripted television. Salsano earned a CPA from the University of Missouri and interned on The Howard Stern Show and Sally Jessy Raphael.

But, she explains, “I was a reality fan first.” After working on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, Salsano was offered the plum job of executive producer on a major talk show. She was just 26 (she just turned 50), and she turned it down. Salsano knew she wanted to helm a reality show.

Then she received a call from Shelly Tatro, a longtime TV exec who told Salsano, “We want to do a show about Italians, and you are the biggest Guido I know. ”

In high school, Salsano wore a black jacket with “GUIDETTE” painted on the back.

Once, the term was intended as a slur, but Salsano and the Jersey Shore cast proudly wave a red-white-and-green flag. “Guido is a lifestyle, a thought process, a way of life,” Salsano explains.

When she brought together this crew, Salsano knew the challenges.

“I had never done a docuseries before,” she says. “It’s very different from casting any other elimination show, which I had done.”

She wanted people who would always be themselves, which would ensure spontaneity.

“If we can predict it, the audience can predict it,” Salsano says. “The audience is not stupid.”

“This show was a celebration of my childhood,” she says. “My favorite movies were John Hughes' movies, and this show is a reality show of a John Hughes movie. This turned into the reality version of Friends. Like Seinfeld, this show is legit about nothing. There are times we have things going on because you are following their lives, but it’s just a group of friends sitting around."

We wouldn’t be talking about them 15 years later had they not gelled, and they did so because Salsano made it personal. “Each of these guys reminded me of one of my friends, and who I shared the shore house with,” she says.

It’s in Snooki that Salsano sees herself.

In the interest of disclosure, I admit Snooki once did my hair. Early in the run, MTV invited me, and I was then the only reporter in the house while the show was shooting. I asked how Snooki did that pouf because I still don’t understand how to get straight hair to do that. She said she would do mine–if I kept it in. I did.

She had zero memory of the styling when I brought it up to her during this trip back to the house. She looked at the photos I showed her, and said, “I must have been drunk then.” She was.

And that’s why people genuinely like her: No artifice.

She settles on a couch in the living room. The famous black pouf now highlighted with golden streaks, but she is as guileless as she was in the beginning and in the several times we have spoken since.

“I always wanted to do a reality show,” Snooki says. “But I didn’t want to do it as a career. I always loved animals, and I wanted to be a vet tech. I’m not smart enough to be a vet. I wanted to do this for 15 minutes and move on.”

Like her best friend, JWoww, she’s a mom now. Snooki has three children and four boutiques. JWoww has one son, and his beautiful face is tattooed on her hand. Upstairs, JWoww chats in the smoosh room, where people banged.

As we sit on the bed where so much transpired, JWoww says, “It feels small. When I was 24, this room looked huge to me.”

She’s about to turn 40, and the memories that linger most are “The smell, the flashbacks of meeting everyone for the first time.”

“Nicole came in very rabid, and it was a lot for me,” she says. “I am an only child and never went to college with a dorm. Within 48 hours, I was madly in love with her, and she’s now my best friend. I’m godmother to her firstborn.”

That they like each other is apparent even in the brief moments when cameras are not recording.

“Times have changed,” Salsano says. “When you are on TV this long, things change.” She cites “some of the more sensitive things we covered—when Mike went away.”

Salsano calls in Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, who recounts how he did time in a federal prison and community service and paid a fine for tax evasion.

“I just didn’t feel I deserved prison time,” he says. “Fans have seen me make mistakes and have seen me become a man. Now I’m nine years clean and sober.”

He remains a tight part of this close-knit TV family, who continue to be one when the shooting stops.

The original series ran 88 episodes. Then there was The Pauly D Project, The Show with Vinny, Snooki & JWoww, Jersey Shore: Family Vacation, All Star Shore. These are just the shows with the Jersey Shore gang; Salsano has produced dozens of others.

She’s not done, though. So what’s next? Snooki & JWoww, the Hot Flashes? Pauly the Bald Years? How long can this keep going?

“Are you kidding me? Salsano asks. “We are growing up with the fans, and the fans are growing up with them. Childbirth, break-ups, raising kids. This could go indefinitely. I just love them. ”

“The Shore franchise has barely gone where it needs to go when you look at Real Housewives. This could be the same," she says. “I think we could go forever–I honestly do.”

“I want them carrying me out in a box,” Salsano says.