‘The Real World’ revisited: When reality had bite
Reunion reminds audiences of how much and how little has changed in TV
Before social media, before reality shows had spread to every corner of earth and sea, there was something genuinely scandalous in MTV’s The Real World, which put seven young people in a New York loft to videotape their every fight and flirtation, promising to show us “what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.”
The creators, Mary-Ellis Bunim, who died in 2004, and Jonathan Murray, referred to it as a “social experiment,” a term that has since been applied to everything from Big Brother to 90 Day Fiancé. But it was not entirely hyperbole; we truly did not know what to expect.
Forty Survivor seasons, umpteen Bravo franchises and one Apprentice host’s presidency later, reality TV is part of the atmosphere: It is entertainment genre and lifestyle, career path and political philosophy. But when the original Real World housemates piled into their SoHo loft — accessorized, winkingly, with a giant aquarium — they were like the first astronaut crew boarding a capsule.
On Thursday, the new Paramount+ streaming service premiered the first episode of The Real World Homecoming: New York, which reunited the now middle-aged medianauts for a brief stay in the same loft in January 2021.
The first episode is nostalgic and a little bittersweet, but not exactly urgent. The castmates hug and cry, share family pictures and sip white wine. Most of the drama comes in flashbacks to the race- and hormone-driven clashes of the original season.
But combine Homecoming with a rewatch of the first season (also streaming on Paramount+, along with several other Real World seasons), and you get an overwhelming sense of how much and how little has changed, in TV and in America.
The series looks much different, and not just in the grunge and hip-hop fashions or the Gen X baby faces of the cast. There’s a raw, earnest documentary feel, even as the producers prime the action with gambits like a getaway trip to Jamaica. Cast and crew alike are figuring out the rules of the new genre and the boundaries of the fourth wall.
The opening titles’ promise of “getting real” may have been marketing. But The Real World really did try to deliver on it, at least in the early years, before the series devolved into a hottub party machine.
The show’s diversity was an evolution for MTV, too. The artsy youngsters of The Real
World: New York included Andre Comeau, a white rocker, as well as Heather B. Gardner, a Black rapper. But the channel had a history, since it began in 1981, of segregating or ignoring Black artists, something David Bowie called out in a famous 1983 MTV interview.
It’s on race where the first season feels most daring and timeless, three decades later. Haircuts change, but America’s racial history runs on geological time. And the first Real World was shot as unrest broke out in Los Angeles over the police acquittals in the beating of Rodney King — itself a piece of vérité-video history.
When the cast reunites in Homecoming, it’s all smiles and selfies. Kevin meets Julie’s teenage daughter, a fan, via video chat. The loft is comfortably styled for middle-aged people now, with modernist furniture and bowls of apples and artichokes. But the main focus of The Real World in 2021 so far is The Real World in 1992. The first episode is stuffed with clips, unaired footage and remember-when.