MTV: From Dumb to Dumberer

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Washington Monthly. Posted November 5, 2003.

Given the number of times it was hyped and replayed during MTV's other programs, even the network's casual viewers could not have missed the signature moment of last winter's season of the channel's emblematic program, "The Real World." During the second episode, in a casino whirlpool on the Las Vegas strip, Trishelle, the full-figured airhead from the bayou whose mother died when Trishelle was 14, moseyed across the hot tub to Brynn, the all-American party girl from rural Washington state, and started kissing and groping her. Steven, the straight guy working to put himself through business school by tending a gay bar, turned to the camera, and gave it an unmistakable what's-a-guy-to-do? look. Then he joined in.

The girl-on-girl action gave the moment a certain edgy salaciousness that had eluded dramatic high points of previous editions of the show, most of which involved too-drunk cast members stumbling about. It also lacked something else, more important for the nation's first reality television program: any element of plausible reality.

"The Real World" gave birth to the entire genre of reality television, and it has taken on to be everything that many people have come to hate about such programs: a lowest-common-denominator, near-pornographic sensibility, and the pervasive sense that we are not watching real people or events, but something soap-operatic and staged. But in its early years, when the program was at least a little bit better, "The Real World" embodied the sorts of characteristics that fueled reality television's extraordinary rise to popularity: the intensely personal dramas, the vivid characters, and the sense (as was the case on "Survivor" or "American Idol") of the almost-attainable-exotic, the notion that we were seeing a world that we did not quite belong to, but wished we did.

Those first shows were aired when I was 13, and I loved them absolutely. They gave viewers like me a sense that there was a more sophisticated, urbane, mature version of cool out there to which we might aspire, once we escaped the stultifying, tyrannical cool of adolescence. It also gave us some idea of what that new cool might look like.

It would involve many friends who had dreadlocks, and some who were intimately acquainted with the operation of turntables. Brightly colored t-shirts with ironic slogans would abound. We would know people who were gay, who were from foreign countries, and maybe even some who were both gay and from foreign countries. Heartbreak would be involved. We would believe deeply in things. There would be exposed brick, and facial hair. We would sometimes be depressed, but when we were depressed, attractive people of the opposite sex would talk to the camera and say how sexy we were when we were depressed; it would be cool to be brooding.

We would all be starting out in careers, but they would be exciting (at least to us) -- cartoonist, punk rock singer. Everyone would tell us our dreams were not attainable but we would know they were. And we would all grin sheepishly when we admitted that we had been less-than-cool in junior high, but everyone would laugh and not believe us, because how could you believe that we had once not been cool? We didn't realize we were being herded into a narrow cultural corridor from which we would emerge as full-fledged yuppies, renovating row houses and evaluating progressive private schools and pasta pots. We just thought we were going to be cool.

From the beginning, critics said that the fantasy of "The Real World" presented was deeply parochial -- a "Saturday Night Live" skit at the time depicted the show as a lot of whiny twenty-somethings in flannels arguing over who had to feed the fish -- and they were right, it was parochial. But for people my age, life itself was pretty small-minded, and the parochial ideal that MTV was selling (your hip twenties) was a whole lot better than the parochial culture we were involved in (middle school). Plus, there was a sweet earnestness to those early episodes that inquiring adolescents could appreciate. The characters struggled with real career ambitions and romantic interests. They were not simply acting for the camera: They were acting out their lives.

Unlike teenagers who were (and still are) the program's target demographic, the show's characters were in their mid-20s. They had clearly defined and articulated ideas of what they wanted to do with their lives -- to be a cartoonist or a dancer -- and they were trying to get there. In the first four seasons, the overarching, propulsive drama was that of people starting to immerse themselves in quasi-adult lives and careers, and the episodes documented the ways in which their experiences corrupted or emboldened their original notions of who they were.

But "The Real World" has since changed its formula dramatically. No longer an outlet for twenty-somethings to brood about their future careers, the show has become a cyclic three-month on-air party for teenagers to mingle in hot tubs and obsess about the present. The locales have changed -- from creative meccas like New York and London to vacation spots like Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Hawaii. MTV has rejiggered the show to require characters to engage in artificial, season-long contests or projects -- like putting together a fashion show -- which the characters embrace in the way most American teenagers experience spring break: as a big party.

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