Levi Johnston's reality show project would be "'Jersey Shore' on ice"

New details have emerged about a reality project that Levi Johnston began developing last summer.


Bristol Palin's former fiance and the father of her child Tripp is currently pitching a new docu-reality series that executive producer Stuart Krasnow describes as "Jersey Shore on ice," The Washington Post reported Monday.

The new information about the series -- which is tentatively-titled Levi Johnston's Final Frontier -- comes less than a week after Discovery Communications acquired the rights to Sarah Palin's Alaska and announced it will air the new documentary series on its TLC cable network.

"If I could wave my magic wand, I would want it to premiere at the exact same hour, minute and second as Sarah Palin's does," Krasnow told The Post.

However he added that Johnston did not decide to launch the series in reaction to Sarah Palin's Alaska, which will be executive produced by Mark Burnett.


"He's a 19-year-old kid living a life like nobody else's on the planet and in the culture of Alaska -- that interested us," explained Krasnow to The Post.

"When Sarah Palin made her announcement, we rushed and decided to go out quicker. In a competitive marketplace, it made sense, if Sarah Palin is going to try to own Alaska. She may try to tell us how beautiful an iceberg is... His version might include skinning a bear."

Last July, Johnston's manager Tank Jones claimed that his client was developing a new series that he stopped short of dubbing reality.

"I don't even want to call it a reality show," Jones told New York Magazine at the time. "It will be a docudrama or something similar. I think the whole reality-show thing is played out."

Krasnow described the project as "authentic and real" and reiterated "it's not trying to just be some anti-Sarah Palin show."


"That is not our motivation," he told The Post.

"We're showing Alaska through somebody else's eyes -- the lives of real people in Alaska -- and throwing into the limelight a good guy who is poised and polite; a good kid."

Johnston has been spotted in the Los Angeles area this week in an RV that Krasnow said has "a party-bus kind of feel to it" but is otherwise all business as it makes stops at various cable networks to pitch the new series.

While the RV was at MTV on Monday, Krasnow declined to reveal any other networks being pitched the series -- only stating that they're all "younger-skewing networks" -- networks that attract "the type [of viewer] that would not watch TLC or Discovery," according to The Post.

In addition, Krasnow was intentionally vague about the project's exact premise because that could change depending on what network buys the show.






About The Author: Christopher Rocchio