A video posted by Samantha Giancola, a young woman who starred in the wildly popular Jersey Shore reality TV series on MTV, shows her taking a zip line tour of a forest in Costa Rica. Mrs. Giancola, who is better known as “Sammi Sweetheart,” shared the short video with her 1.7 million Twitter followers, and it has been viewed thousands of times on the video sharing social network Keek.

Sammi was born and raised in New Jersey and has Italian and Greek ancestry. Although she is mostly known for her role on MTV’s Jersey Shore, she has managed to find plenty of modeling work after showing off her curvy figure on the hit reality show. She may not be as popular as her friend Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, but she also has her own perfume just like the more famous Jersey Shore cast member. On the show, Sammi was portrayed as a very sweet and loveable woman who was actually a serial dater and heartbreaker.

Costa Rica: A Stage for Reality Television

Although Sammi was not in Costa Rica to film scenes for scripted reality TV shows, the country often serves as the backdrop for this popular sub-genre of television entertainment. Major productions have included the United States version of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! (an original British concept), Temptation Island, Love in the Wild, The Bachelor, and Amazing Race.

Other reality shows choose to send their cast members to Costa Rica just to see how their scripted situations will unfold in a different environment. Such a move often results in high ratings; to wit: when Alexis Belino of The Real Housewives of Orange County thought Costa Rica was part of Mexico. Whenever the MTV hits Real World/Road Rules Challenge came to film in Costa Rica, the episodes were well-received.

In 2013, Costa Rica has already been featured in HGTV’s House Hunters International and a pilot about the expatriate experience here was also filmed for the U.S. cable network. Discovery Network’s Naked and Afraid chose our forests to film unlucky cast members run around in the wild while being… naked and scared, of course. There’s also the Mark Lugo Creative Entertainment agency, which is based in Costa Rica and produces reality TV shows among other activities; this agency, along with the state of reality TV productions in our country, was mentioned in a 2012 article published in the Costa Rica Star.