Friday, Sep 5, 2008
The show that spawned reality television comes back for its 10th season, forgetting the lessons it taught everyone else.
Jul 3, 2001 | "The Real World," MTV's circle jerk of narcissism, voyeurism and exhibitionism, turns 10 years old on Tuesday. Watch tonight's show and you'll see seven young cast members exploring the expansive New York loft they'll call home for the next three months. There's a potentially racist and homophobic suburbanite from Ohio, a virginal blond, a feisty black woman from San Francisco and a male cancer survivor who's already interested in an attractive plain-Jane Jersey girl.
It all seems so familiar now -- even more so with all the other reality shows on TV -- but it's important to remember that "The Real World" actually invented an entire genre of television. By putting real people in an artificial context (a beautiful, free apartment stocked with cute, well-groomed roommates), producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray figured out a way to combine documentary and drama into a sort of soap opera that we'd never seen before.
"The Real World" was so far ahead of its trend that the rest of television took nine years to catch up. And "Making the Band," the first of the new network reality shows, was also made by Bunim and Murray. But watch any reality show now -- even crap like last year's "Big Brother" or the imports from overseas -- and "The Real World's" influence will be so obvious you'll probably miss it.
The "Real World" gave us cast members talking directly into the camera in one-person confessionals. It seamlessly blended hip music into location shots with its stars. The producers typecast for conflicts, and they introduced a system of editing hundreds of hours of footage into half-hour or hour-long narrative arcs. And several producers and directors who now appear in the credits for new reality TV shows such as "Fear Factor" and "The Mole" also learned their stuff at "The Real World."
The 10th season returns the show to its Big Apple roots. But if the first episode is any indication, geography will be the only thing this season has in common with "The Real World's" first. The show may look the same and feel the same, but underneath that scrawled logo and hip loft, something is missing.
When exactly "The Real World" jumped the shark is debatable, but clearly the show isn't the consistently dramatic and entertaining half-hour that it used to be. The advent of gimmicks -- like forcing the cast to work a job together (which began in Miami with the infamous business that never got off the ground) or casting close friends (as happened during the Seattle season) -- seemed to indicate that the show was moving away from a proven formula.
What really broke, though, was the cast.
MTV's history of press releases about the show illustrates the transformation. From the first "Real World," April 23, 1992: "As sparks fly, MTV captures every moment -- in the loft, around the New York City scene, and wherever their lives may take them."
The key word is "lives." Fast-forward to Seattle 1998. That season's press release describes the show as chronicling "the cast's daily lives as the diverse group contemplates its future while hanging out with today's hottest bands."
Contemplating the future has never made for scintillating television. And even though the Seattle season saw plenty of drama -- tough-guy David had a drawn-out affair with the show's casting director -- something has unquestionably been missing ever since that year.
What was missing were the cast's lives. Gone are the days when the producers plucked random people off the streets and invited them to live in a loft and have their life taped. In the first couple of years we met a hip-hop MC, a comic book artist and an AIDS activist. And the show often followed the characters as they pursued their careers and their goals.
Later, complex identities turned into stock character traits. We got the frat boy, the sheltered religious girl, the down-to-earth black guy, the attractive gay person or various combinations of each. Worse, we met cast members who grew up with the series, and the show has never been the same.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
