On the heels of major success from Jersey Shore and Floribama Shore, MTV is premiering a brand new Shore franchise show, Buckhead Shore, on June 23. The series features a group of friends from Georgia heading to party it up at “head buck”, Parker Lipman’s, lake house. However, with Parker’s ex, Katie Canham, and new girlfriend, Savannah Gabriel, both in the picture, things are bound to get messy. “It was definitely very hard, to say the least,” Parker told HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY. “Katie and I essentially sold the show because we had been together for almost four years and we were in quarantine at my lake house together. This is somebody that I love. [But after we broke up], and me bringing Savannah into the situation and us all being together at the lake, it was a very tough dynamic to deal with. I couldn’t catch a break.”
For Katie, the hardest part was the transition from feeling so comfortable at Parker’s lake house to feeling like a guest. “I’ve always just acted a certain way, as if it was my house, as well,” she explained. “And now I’m at my ex-boyfriend’s house and he has a new girlfriend, so I’m like, ‘Okay, I can’t do certain things because it’s technically not my house anymore.’ I definitely have moments where I get mad and you’ll see that on camera, but I feel like it was still fun.”
It wasn’t all drama, though, as Savannah admitted to eventually being more at ease with Katie as filming went on. “It was probably more difficult to live with Parker [than Katie],” she revealed. “At some point, me and Katie sort of bonded through it because we were both feeling the same way — uncomfortable and we both had feelings for Parker. So we kind of bonded through that.”
Luckily, there were plenty of other people in the house to provide distractions when things got too intense. “Some days it was tense with them and some days it was like, ‘I’m tired of dealing with you all, I’m going to go turn up and live my life,'” fellow cast member, Chelsea Prescott, said.
Unlike former Shore franchise shows, Buckhead Shore features a group of people who have history, as opposed to being brought together strictly to film a show. “We open up our lives in a really personal way with each other,” Bethania Locke explained. “It will be interesting for people to get a peek inside a real, authentic friend group.”
As for the comparisons to Jersey Shore, the cast insisted that Buckhead Shore will be completely different. “We support them, we love them, and they motivate us, but we’re a friend group,” DJ Simmons said. “We talk to each other all the time, we have a group message and we all mesh with each other. And there’s history with everybody. Everybody’s linked to someone in some sort of way.” Pat Muresan added, “We grew up watching Jersey Shore, but our group is different than that. I feel like we all have such different backgrounds and it’s a completely different type of show, to me, at least.”
Buckhead Shore premieres on June 23 at 9:00 p.m. on MTV. The season one premiere will follow the first episode of season 5b of Jersey Shore: Family Vacation.