On MTV's reality television show "Jersey Shore," the Beachcomber Bar is a place where the clothes are skimpy and punches can fly.

But there's another reality in the resort town Seaside Heights, which is both a setting and a state of mind on the show about eight buff, tanned twenty-somethings and the havoc they create while living together for a month in a posh home.

As the show airs this month and next, the town of some 3,100 year-round residents is hushed. Most of the boardwalk businesses are closed. Only a few fishermen and some beach rehabilitation workers are out. The Ferris wheel and carnival games are shuttered.

And the people who are around this time of year say this just isn't the same place as the one on the show, which was filmed in the summer when the town's population grows tenfold with families at the beach by day and a sometimes wild club scene by night.

Just as one group of Italian-Americans has protested, claiming the show gives them a bad name, many locals think it smears the community.

"You're trying to create a family town, and you got a bunch of kids acting very rude, and it doesn't create a good image," said John LaStalla, a 44-year-old native and municipal worker.

The stars, mostly Italian-Americans and including only one from New Jersey, dance, pump iron and party _ a lot. They work in a T-shirt shop _ a little. And their specialty is drama, whether it involves each other, the people they meet, boyfriends from home or moms. Though unscripted, there are echoes of sitcoms.

Much like when Peter from the "Brady Bunch" juggles two dates at once, cast members Pauly Delvecchio and Mike "The Situation" Sorrento try to get two women out of the house to make room for two more. It's hardly a spoiler to reveal the plan doesn't work so well.

Even before the show debuted Dec. 3, the New Jersey-based Italian-American service organization UNICO National called on MTV to cancel it, deeming it offensive and reliant on crude stereotypes.

Since then, MTV, which has long put strong-willed strangers in homes together and filmed what follows, has stopped referring to the "Jersey Shore" cast as guidos in its promos _ even though cast members frequently and proudly call themselves guidos on the show.

The network, in a catchall statement, said: "We understand that this show is not intended for every audience and depicts just one aspect of youth culture. Our intention was never to stereotype, discriminate or offend."