in Christopher Nolan's version of the Odyssey, Matt Damon lands on a remote isle where, intoxicated by the lotus flowers that Charlize Theron feeds him, he stays for seven years before managing to extricate himself back to the real world.

this scene in the movie apparently (as this post will show, I am not a classics scholar) remixes and intermingles three different stories from the original: one where Odysseus's men encounter the "lotus eaters," whose devotion to that plant wipes out any desire other than to consume more of the plant; one where Odysseus is seduced by Circe, spending a year partying with her and his crew instead of continuing his hero’s journey; and one where Odysseus is shipwrecked onto Calypso's island for seven years.

in the movie, Calypso is a hot trauma therapist/mom figure. in the original, she is a possessive god. Odysseus spends his long days crying on the shore looking out at the endless horizon and his nights in her bed with her. she tries various things to make him stay including dragging his wife (“I know my body is better than hers is”, in Emily Wilson’s translation). she offers to make him immortal if he'll stay forever. he rejects her, and, after a convenient act of god, leaves her and continues the story.

i enjoyed the majestic sexless spectacle of The Odyssey (2026) as much as the next person, but the sagas i have been truly bound 2 fall in love with this summer are the various international spinoffs of that early aughts cornerstone of American reality trash, Jersey Shore.

i started down this journey on a whim after getting an algorithmic recommendation in Paramount+ for Canada Shore, the most recent reboot, which was then airing live. i found that it gave me exactly the kind of chaotic energy i had been missing from the snooze of shows like Love is Blind. energized after devouring it, i quickly moved on to the previous spinoff, Aussie Shore (less angsty than Canada Shore, which an Australian coworker attributed to “the power of a tropical climate”). i finished that one as well and through this actual summer have been living inside the previous spinoff, Geordie Shore (based in Newcastle, home of the titular Geordies), which strings its tale across an epic 26 seasons (i am at the beginning of the fourth, so I will probably be here a while).

what’s funny about how i can’t stop watching hour after hour of these shows is that, across the franchises and through the seasons and casts i have watched, basically every day is exactly the same.

• the cast members go out at night and get incredibly trashed at a club

• they come home to the house they share and get into drunken fights where they cause property damage and/or say horrible things to each other and/or have sex with each other or people they met at the club, before they finally pass out

• they wake up the next morning, more hungover than i have ever been in my life (and i have been VERY hungover in my life), clean up the wreckage of the house, and mend the relationships they tore the previous night.

• they receive the day’s deus ex machina; a call from the producers telling them about the work (one or two cast members will have to do a novelty job like renting jet skis) and non-work activity for the day, which almost inevitably is centered around getting drunk (in a notable episode of Canada Shore, for example, they went to an outdoor day party devoted to the combination EDM and white wine??).

• to this activity’s promise of more binge drinking, they all universally and without any self-consciousness immediately get excited and say some variant of “oh wow, we all needed this so bad, it’s time for the house to really let loose and have fun” (as though they do not all still have alcohol in their blood from the previous night).

• they rally, do their work/day-drinking activity, come back home to get dressed up (on Geordie Shore in particular i have never seen deeper scoop neck t-shirts) and do some pre-drinking

• they go out and get incredibly trashed at a club

• they come home and get into drunken fights where they cause property damage and/or say horrible things to each other and/or have sex with each other or people they met at the club, before they finally pass out.

• they wake up the next morning…

…and so on and so on and so on. it’s like the cast are Odysseus’s crew, stuck in some sort of time loop where, due to the mind-erasing power of the substance they guzzle, they live this static existence, a summer that is endless if only because nothing ever really changes (which is reinforced by the fact that as a rule, the cast repeats season to season, so you’re seeing these people not over the course of one summer but over years). of course, things shift on the margins—people make up, people break up, cast members leave or are kicked off for bad behavior—but fundamentally, it’s the same every time.

friends have pressed me on why i continue to watch hour after hour of this, day after day, when there are so many other ways to spend my life.

part of it is my rejection of the conservatism of the production choices on many contemporary reality shows. it’s complicated: on the one hand, in 2026, i think it is the correct choice (ethically, legally) for producers to prevent normal people (i exclude Real Housewives, who are not normal; i also recognize that i haven’t watched Summer House and what i’m describing sounds something like what i understand that show to be, but i just generally can’t seem to get it up for Bravo shows) from getting blackout drunk and behaving poorly while constantly filming them for a television show (several big shows on air today have strictly-enforced drinking limits, which is why you don’t see anyone wasted on love island (which makes even more impressive the annual gross-out challenges where they regurgitate food into each others’ mouths)). on the other hand, we live at a time where everyone on television is constantly aware of their brand and the way they want to be viewed by the audience and is trying to aim every utterance and choice down the barrel of the brand. alcohol, in large quantities, is a magic potion that scrambles this self presentation: when you are very drunk, there is only so much control that you can exert over yourself. for newer shows filming now, the ethics of this are a live question (kind of a Scylla/Charybdis sitch imo), but Geordie Shore is a historical text which i am studying anthropologically as a scholar and so i don’t think i have to feel bad about it.

part of my love for the show is a rejection of the hollow, artificial forms of contemporary reality. i think fundamentally i would always rather watch a show about people living together in a house and having some version of a normal life (however alcohol-drenched and free of real responsibility) rather than being pulled out of the world to live in a same-sex dorm and entering a row of “pods” where they have anodyne conversations about the topics that producers allow them (can you tell how much i hate Love is Blind) or elsewhere taking part in a bloodless “trial marriage” which in practice usually just means having a roommate for a few weeks.

part of it is a rejection of the conservatism of the cast members on many contemporary reality shows. if i have to hear one more person on a Netflix reality show talk about how a man should be the provider and woman coming from a rib or some bullshit like that, i’m going to vomit fully sober. the Geordies (and the rest of the dwellers of the shore) are nae perfect: the show is riven with, among other things, a steady ambient radiation of casual misogyny, and the Shore shows are without a doubt the most sexually explicit reality TV i have ever watched, which is really saying something. i remember watching one of my first episodes of the much more recent Canada Shore and seeing one character do a detailed pantomime of ass eating on another and was like “this is what i have been missing from TV”.

i have watched i don’t know how many instances of sex filmed with night vision cameras, often multiple couples in the same room and sometimes the same bed. i have watched star-crossed lovers in the backseat of a Mexican taxi play “the gear shift game” where the woman puts her hand around the penis of a man and jerks it around mirroring the movements of the driver and his transmission. i have watched one cast member pass around his fleshlight. i have watched an extended sequence of a woman revealing that she has the power to queef loudly on command and does this, in a variety of settings, for several minutes (and then, watching a different cast, seen ANOTHER sequence of this same thing, with the later instance clearly unaware that this very specific thing has already happened). i have watched another woman repeatedly force her male castmate to have sex with her. i have watched an injured man with a knee brace fucking a roommate standing up in a shower in Cancun (these are the same people as in the previous sentence). i have watched people vomiting, pissing, and shitting themselves and then rally and try to hook up. i have watched, in the middle of a drinking game, someone pull a flaccid penis out of basketball shorts and pop it in her mouth.

but—and i know this is going to sound crazy and probably mark how old i am—the sexual politics still feel so…quaint? compared to the world we live in which seems to be full of Tate and Epstein and Clavicular and choking porn and all the other things that as a normie married person seem insane to me. the Geordies, fundamentally, just want to hook up! they are all of them, men and women alike, libertines, who (with varying degrees of success, often harder for the women because Patriarchy) claim their sexual agency and try to author their lives, to have the experiences of their dreams, and those are the kind of protagonists i have always identified with and wanted to see more of in society (and, especially, on television). not that i was one myself: i did a lot of drinking at this age, but i never had a hoe phase. so i recognize that, in some ways, my love of the Shore is nostalgia for a youth that i was adjacent to but never truly participated in. they live the life i dreamed of but only knew through TV. it also helps that (gwen stefani voice) underneath it all, despite how fucked up they often are (in all senses of the word), they do have these deep bonds that get deeper over the years and are moving examples of television friendships (most notably on Geordie Shore, the complicated on-and-off romance/friendship between star-crossed lovers Charlotte and Gary).

the final way Geordie Shore, in particular, is similar to consuming the historical text of the Odyssey is the Geordie dialect, which is nae impenetrable for the outsider and involves, among various bits of slang (“reet”, “gan”, “tash”) and strange verb conjugation (“cannae”, “diven’t”), this fascinating mangling of pronouns wherein singular and plural first person pronouns are used to refer to the same thing, with a person referring to themselves as both “me” and “us” (or “wer”) in the same sentence.

my favorite linguistic tic, though, is the use of “mortal,” which is their chosen synonym for “wasted” and which they say so often that if you were doing a drinking game for it while watching the show, you’d get as drunk as them.

i find it funny and weirdly kind of moving every time, this emphasis on “getting mortal”. like classical heroes, they put their bodies and souls through great trials in pursuit of something important. they want to return home too; it’s just that home is this house where the alcohol flows like the river Styx and your friends never leave.

on the most recent incredibly millenial charli xcx album, she has a song, “2007,”

the endlessly repeated chorus of which is, like a mantra, “i can take you to heaven like it’s / 2007.” a fair critique would be to say she’s stuck in the past and i guess i am too. for me, when i’m at the shore, summer never seems to end, and i hope to hold onto this heaven as long as i can.