Ok. I just sat thru a marathon of Real World 67 or whatever one they are on right now and I just don’t get how they get away with calling this show “Real World”.
In the Real World do we get put up in a massive apt decked out with all the phattest furniture, not pay any rent, not pay any utilities, not even keep a goddman job, and basically just worry about our roomates trying to f**k us when we are drunk?
In the Real World are problems like, “This bitch wont stop showing me her vagina!”, and “Which roomate should I blow this week” and “Mom why doesnt anyone like ME?!?” really worth all the tears you see on this show?
If these are problems that are experienced in the Real World, I want to live there so I can stop paying bills and start f**kin my slutty roomates.
Is there ANYTHING real about this and similar shows?
They call it “The Real World” because it rolls off the tongue a lot better than the “Not necessarily scripted, but still not all that real because let’s face it, real people pay rent! World”.
It’s all a matter of degree. Even now, Real World is more “real” than:
People living in an IKEA furnished prison, raising poultry in the courtyard, and voting someone off on a regular basis.
People living on an island or in a desert, pretending to be part of “tribes”, performing a bunch of pointless stunts, and voting someone off on a regular basis.
People being strapped to a chair and a heart rate monitor, and either:
a. Having alligators dropped in their faces in between questions from John McEnroe, or
b. Getting pelting with ice or baked by extreme heat while answering questions.
People eating worms or getting dunked in a tank of water till they’re about to suffocate.
An English lady making snide remarks while contestants of mediocre intelligence repeatedly give the wrong answers to simple questions. Between rounds, the contestants vote someone off.
The truth about “reality” television is that virtually nothing could be further from reality. A more accurate term would be “voyeur TV”. Whether or not you like some or all of these shows, the basic theme is voyeurism. People watch these shows for the same reason that a Walmart employee pays close attention to the closed-circuit television feed from the ladies fitting room.
As for MTV’s “Real World”, I think that it initially had a very tenuous link to reality, which has progressively become more attenuated. Even so, it is vastly more “real” than something like Big Brother, in that the Real World roommates do more normal things–go to restaurants, clubs, museums, etc. The thing that has happened over the years is that the cast members now come into the show with a lot of preconceived notions of how they’re going to act and what it will be like. For instance, everyone knows that the Real World casting directors look for a number of stock characters, and need to fill most of the following roles in every cast:
The “gay one”: Originally, this character was meant to shock us and to shock his/her roommates. Now, everyone’s shocked if there isn’t a gay roommate. Sometimes, the casting directors decide to throw us a curveball and include two gay cast members.
The roommate with a drinking problem: Almost always at least one…the extreme example is Dom from L.A., also notable is that female cast member from New Orleans…I forget her name, but she was drunk almost as often as Dom, you know who I’m talking about.
Naive whitebread kid: (Jon L.A., Julie New Orleans, Cory San Franscisco, Elka Boston, etc.) Virtually every cast has to have an 18-19 year old who comes from a very protective family and has little experience out in the world. Usually, this cast member will come from a fundamentalist religious background. At some point in the show, naive whitebread kid makes an off-the-cuff remark, not intending to offend anyone, but which shocks someone else in the house. If naive whitebread kid is a female, this incident will end with a weepy breakdown and group hug.
Muscular black guy: For instance, Syrus from the Boston cast and the guy from New Orleans. This cast member is gregarious and generally friendly, but tends to be a playa in his romantic endeavors.
Surfer/Skater Dude: This cast member may be an actual surfer or skater. He may be some other sort of daredevil, or he may simply have the look of a surfer/skater dude (i.e. short blonde hair, perhaps with a spikey look, may often wear sunglasses) This cast member is almost always male. The most famous of the “dudes” was actually a bike messenger. This stock character shows up in L.A., San Francisco, New Orleans, etc.
And there will always be someone who is a creative artist of some type, though this interest is usually merged into one of the primary stock characters.
One thing that we can blame Real World for is that the show popularized the “voting someone off” concept, even though it was never an obligatory thing for the Real World cast to do. Perhaps if they could have gotten along with David and Puck in the early years, we would not be plagued with Big Brother and Survivor type shows today.
Not to mention the fact “The Sterotypically Predictable World” wouldn’t garner ratings. Come to think of it, the creator’s of the program should have borrowed from Warhol and entitled it “The Plastic Exploding Inevitable” but I guess they thought that wasn’t urban chic enough
I watched a couple of episodes the first season. After that I assumed that the actual title was supposed to be “The real boring world” but that they shortened it.
The producers are constantly adding more rules, with the intention of encouraging more interaction between the castmates, that make it less “real.” For instance–no TV’s in the house, no stereos, and no personal music. How many people “really” live that way?
you forgot that the black guy always gets kicked out, or at least he gets to be the subject of multiple “house meetings”, because one of the women feels somehow threatened by him.
I don’t think the first season was as planned/scripted as subsequent seasons. There certainly was a gay roommate (Norm - doubling as the artist), the young innocent one (Julie), the rogue (Eric), several musicians (Becky, Andre, Heather), and the black activist (Kevin). My guess is that the mix “worked” so they stuck with it.
I’ve watched almost every season, and it just seems to get further and further from reality.
Someone explained it to me this way: It’s called “The Real World” because the people on the show are all so overly dramatic that they would act that way regardless of whether people taped them or not.
The show has become just a vehicle for people who want to be in show business to get into the “Post-Real World/Road Rules” franchise. They’re all a bunch of drama queens (and Kings) who whine and snipe.
Don’t forget that most of the black guys are also players (specifically Cyrus and Tek) bringing home a new stripper every night.
And don’t forget the queen of drunk girls, the one in Hawaii.
I read in a magazine somewhere that when it started out, they really did want it to be realistic, but that concept quickly bombed. It was by someone who had worked on the first couple seasons’ shows; the article was named something like “How the Real World Got Unreal”:
They originally intended to follow ordinary college kids around with a camera at college, but apart from the weekend evening parties, that was (wisely) seen beforehand as pretty boring.
They thought of just doing the “Real-World-Party” thing and just follow the people to the weekend parties, but threw it out because it wouldn’t provide enough personal footage fast enough to supply the show’s schedule.
So they decided to require the kids to take a semester off of college. All the normal people (those in college to actually get a degree) refused to do so, leaving them with only slacker-types who didn’t care about losing a semester of college. The college requirement was eventually dropped totally, due to the lack of willing participants.
The slacker-types were really supposed to get jobs, but nobody would hire them to really do anything necessary if a cameraman was going to be following two steps behind them all the time, even on the job.
So they had no money, and had to be given a place to stay. Keeping them together in one house made it easier to film. They wouldn’t hang around much in a slum, so all their housing has tended towards luxuriousness that anyone with their real jobs couldn’t possibly afford.
But they had nothing to do, and so had to be given “jobs”. They flatly refused to do any kind of crap job they were actually qualified for, so they were given fake jobs, really. Most wanted to be in show-business, so all the jobs became show-business related.
MTV got far, far more white male applicants than any others. That didn’t fit the multicultural image of the company, and they decided that if they had to actually choose people anyway, they might as well go the “token” route to add some spice, as well as specifically try to pick people who wouldn’t get along well.
This backfired major-big-time when due to various women cast members’ protests, the first two seasons, the black guys got thrown off the show for harassing/man-handling women.
All the first-year people appeared to be fairly drug-free. Some were. The crew was constantly battling some cast members’ drug use, complete with surrepititious serches of personal property when the cast members were out somewhere else. None of this was ever shown or mentioned though, either the searches or the confrontations of the persons themselves. Management didn’t want to deal with law enforcement problems stemming from showing cast members using drugs at the apartment, so there, drugs were supposed to be not allowed at all, either use or storage.
…
I wish I’d have save the magazine, it was a funny story with much more detail. MTV started out wanting real, actual people, and ended up with, well, -what they got. - DougC
