When you work in the MTV Newsroom, it's easy to get a little jaded. After all, there's an unspoken agreement that everybody is going to play it cool at all times, even when some of the biggest stars in entertainment walk through the door. So even when big-time musicians, actors and athletes show up, there is typically very little ballyhoo upon their arrival. They show up, they sit down with the interview crew, and they slip out undetected.
But on Thursday (December 17), that idea was completely thrown out the window, because the cast of "Jersey Shore" was in the building. There was an unprecedented buzz for most of the morning, and everybody was contemplating questions that don't normally crop up around other stars. Would the Situation flash hit abs? How are we supposed to pronounce all the consonants in "J-Wowww"? Just how short is Snooki? These are the sort of conversations that don't come up when, say, Justin Bieber is coming in for a chat. The "Jersey Shore" interviews were fast becoming the most hotly-anticipated in recent memory.
The crowd that gathered around to watch MTV News' Tim Kash chat up the cast of "Jersey Shore" was unprecedented. It helped that the interviews were happening concurrently with the MTV holiday party (which featured a surprise set from All Time Low — more on that later today), so people from all over the building were wandering in to get a glimpse of MTV's newest reality stars. In fact, the crowd got to be so intense that producer Nick Neofitidis started lining up staff members to sit down and ask questions of Snooki. (This was just after she gave MTV staffer Ashley Mastronardi's hair "the poof" — more on that later as well.) When you combine the buzz over the show with the fact that people weren't expected to work and most had consumed an adult beverage or two, it made for a high-energy, almost raucous experience — not unlike the scene at Karma on "Jersey Shore."