This Just In: MTV Cancels Jersey Shore
Gym. Tan. Look for a job.

MTV has announced that Jersey Shore‘s upcoming sixth season (debuting Oct. 4) will be its last.

New Jersey’s unemployment rate is about to get a little higher.

MTV is pulling the plug on its modern classic reality series Jersey Shore.

The sixth and final edition of the show recently wrapped production and will debut Thursday, Oct. 4, with the crew back in Seaside Heights for one last party. The network is also airing a retrospective Jersey Shore special titled “Gym, Tan, Look Back” that will include a first look at the final season. The special will air before the Video Music Awards on Thursday, Sept. 6. The Shore cast will make a live appearance on the red carpet during the VMAs pre-show, as well.

Shore was one of the most polarizing shows in TV history, but no one can deny its enormous success and pop culture influence. The series debuted in 2009 amid controversy from Italian-American groups, who said the show’s self-described “guido” cast were ethnic stereotypes. But MTV viewers shrugged off the complaints and, after a somewhat average debut, Jersey Shore quickly took off in the ratings.

Two years after its debut, Shore hit nearly 9 million viewers a week and became the most popular program in MTV’s history. The show launched a whole lexicon of Shore slang (fist pumping, gym-tan-laundry, smush room, getting-it-in…) and made household-name stars of its cast, who lined up lucrative endorsement and appearance deals. Moreover, the basic cable reality series routinely managed to trounce major broadcast network shows in the key adults 18-49 demographic.

And then, last summer, an ambitious overseas expedition to Italy marked the beginning of the end, with Shore‘s numbers slipping notably for the first time during the show’s fourth season. A return to Seaside in January saw ratings drop further, to 7.6 million for the show’s premiere.

If those still seem like giant numbers for MTV, they are. Shore‘s cancellation is about more than the size of the audience. The cast leveraged a series of raises over the years that has partly offset the show’s ratings success (their contracts expire at the end of the upcoming season). Moreover, Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi — arguably the show’s most popular castmember along with Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino — just had her first child, putting the show’s hard-living beach party TV fantasy on a crash course with grown-up reality. At one point during the upcoming season, Snooki left the Shore house, having previously cited concerns about whether the set was the proper environment for a mother-to-be. The overall sense has been that, creatively, the show has run its course.

The sixth season is not expected to actively portray that the series is coming to close. Before filming began, the cast was informed this might be the show’s final season, but they were not officially told the news until this morning. The show is survived by its two spin-offs, The Pauly D Project and Snooki & JWOWW. Though MTV has not yet announced a verdict on Pauly D Project, the Snooki series was picked up for a second season.

MTV reality executive Chris Linn, who previously told EW that this was “very possibly” the show’s final season, also recently expressed interest in airing a special covering Snooki’s wedding. “I would love to have a Snooki-Jionni wedding,” Linn said. “That could be amazing.”