I started watching old episodes of the “The Real World” recently. If you grew up in the nineties or early aughts then you remember the cultural power of MTV and this one show in particular. For those from younger generations, it’s important to know there was a time when people would spend hours watching a succession of music videos, which were a weird of blend of performance art, avant-garde cinema, preening, cool signaling, and abstract expression with a musical soundtrack overlay. It was the visual center of cool, a reflection of disparate strands of expression aligned to tribes of musical affinities. Whatever your personal proclivities, usually manifest in style in dress, could be found at different times on the channel. It was both a guide to the outside world of cool and the mirror you measured yourself against.
I remember how all of Bret Easton Ellis’ early novels focused on what I think was peak MTV Generation, the people most mired in the swirl of cool and edginess and libertine rejection of adult responsibility and glib empathy, instead of those standing on the outside of cool and looking through the shop window. This was the generation that preceded mine, and the one that came before the short lull of pseudo-verite depiction of common people with common problems and desires, and had a very brief window of cultural appeal before everything inevitably regressed into naked spectacle and sad genuflection at the altar of the (low) attention economy.
It’s interesting to look back now at a show filmed something like thirty years ago and see the arc of reality television history at its inception. I’m struck by how different the characters and situations were in the early days of “The Real World” and what they became in later iterations. In the third season, filmed in San Francisco, the characters are all young and at various stages of adult actualization. They are signed up for what feels like a science experiment. They are living their lives, which happens to include cohabitating with strangers of different backgrounds and ideologies, and they aren’t stuck on the perceived power of the persona they are creating. They are striving to find their place in the world and we have a keyhole view into what that was like for just a few examples. It all comes off as very authentic, naive, but authentic to a particularly time in television history. They are very different people, archetypes really, but are unified by the notion that the home life shared in the television show is ancillary to their outward goals beyond the frame of the show.
Judd wakes up every morning and works on his art, hoping to land paying work. Pam works around the clock in the medical field. Mohammad is a rapper of some renown in the Bay Area. Cory and Rachel are coping with the onset of adulthood and the societal imperative to have a career, though in a nod to our fulfillment oriented drive, they want to find some meaning in that commitment to a future life. Pedro lives and educates about AIDS, in a time where society had generally rallied to the cause and gayness was gaining more acceptance. Puck, maybe the least authentic of the bunch, was a harbinger of what reality television was to become, though it’s not clear that was his intention. He was a child really, driven by his very specific notion of coolness or authenticity, which unknown to him was an all too common affect then and now. The point is that they are humans with some depth, emblematic I think, of a particular time, one I didn’t personally experience, but feels more grounded in reality when looked at through post-internet and hyperreal eyes.
That is very different from what the show became over time. It stopped being a blip of a life stage or quasi-social experiment, but a goal in itself. The characters started focusing all their attention on the drama of the house, playing roles, engaging in spectacle for its own sake. That shift coincided with the end of characters having their own jobs or life goals outside the house. Instead they were given a job, which was only a set-up for the fabrication of more drama – characters no longer just living together, but also working together in a meaningless jobs. With nothing to do with their day they were free to drink as a hobby and cultivate themselves for the audience. Living a frivolous and low consequence life backed by middle class comfort (for most characters) was the point. MTV was no longer a mirror and repository of an angst-filled generation on the cusp of technological driven change to all social life, but now a crass late empire entertainment spectacle. It became a beacon of what attainment and contentment came to mean in the life of the twenty-something: life as a character in an upper middle class melodrama, regardless of your economic situation.
This raises a question for me that straightforward but hard to answer: Did our mediated culture change drastically over time or did the producers and executives at that particular network change their approach to casting to capitalize on our collective desire for spectacle, or was it a little bit of both? I think as reality television changed and became more mature, people learned how to cash in on the spotlight, etc. It altered our expectations and how that cast behaved, and many that followed across many networks. Relationships with the camera are always morphing. Today we are still evolving how we should be living, behaving, in the constant glare of surveillance capitalism. I also think producers put their thumbs on the scale in casting, looking for the outlandish over the staid, the boisterous over the conscientious, the loud over the considerate. Sometimes we forget the power of businesses and business leaders, or producers in this case, and social arbiters today. They have more power than you and I to influence a few kids or let’s say a generation. It’s not always clear how seriously they take that responsibility when it’s very easy to appeal to our general desire be unchallenged and constantly entertained.
The show was called “The Real World” and paradoxically it stopped delivering on that premise pretty quickly. I wonder what an apt depiction of the real world would look like today, one that doesn’t focus on artists or archetypes necessarily, but maybe shows us our media soaked and docile lives in some random small town, filled with dreams of going viral and getting paid to play yourself in real life. I would watch that reality show.
