I fully admit to not taking notes or even giving the fourth season premiere of Jersey Shore my full attention. Not only do first episodes of these kinds of things tend to be pretty basic (packing scene followed by small groups of the cast members getting together followed by a race to get to their new house with lots of hijinks and general ignorance peppered in) and because my wife and I just got iPhones and like the rest of the world have found ourselves addicted to Angry Birds.

Even so, the episode wasn’t exactly hard to follow. You get the scenes of them packing and a few updates. Jenni and Roger are still together (good for them), Snooki’s still with that one guy and Sammi and Ronnie are still broken up. My favorite moment from this part of the episode was when Ronnie’s friends were making fun of him and telling him not to fall in love or cry this season. Awesome. The girls decide to all get together at Deena’s house while the guys all meet up at Vinnie’s house. From there it’s the aforementioned travel and “race” with the guys getting to the house in Italy first. As you’d expect, the house is pretty nice, though we find out later that it doesn’t have nearly the electrical output that a quartet of Jersey Shore girls need to do their hair.

Let’s see, they go out and wander around Italy for a little while, drawing a crowd. The next day Snooki drives the girls around in one car while the guys are in another. This is all set-up for when Snooki eventually smashes into the cop escort later on with her talking about how she’s finally useful now. After that there’s a club night. Since Vinnie’s the only one who speaks Italian, he’s the only one who can help the guys talk to girls. It doesn’t seem like any of them hooked up. Well, Vinny and Deena kiss, but I think that was it.

Oh, Mike also told Ronnie that he hooked up with Snooki while she was dating her guy. He also seemed pretty bummed out that Snooki was dating him still and said he could see himself getting with her. Oh man, that’s almost too perfect. If those crazy kids couldn’t make it…

That’s really all I got. I was a little surprised with how well everyone seemed to be getting along. If memory serves, the Season 3 reunion was pretty tense, right? That all seemed to be pretty washed away, even all the nonsense between Ronnie and Sammi. May they never get back together! From the “later on this season” clips it looks like the Mike/Snooki thing really gets intense, possibly leading to a fight between him and Ronnie, which–according to the editing–looks like it winds up with Mike getting laid out. We’ll see I guess. Overall, I think this is a pretty goofy idea for a season. Sending a bunch of jamokes to a country where only one of them knows the language (and only a little) and see what kind of nonsense they get into. It reeks of “bringing in cousin Oliver” but we’ll see. If this was the last season, I don’t think I’d be too upset. The JS kids are starting to feel like aging Real Housewives of New York to me right now. Might be time for them to hang up their guns after this.