That first season set many reality-TV conventions, like the now-rote “confessional” interviews. (In a way, the “getting real” credo also prefigured today’s culture wars, echoing both the progressive spirit that society needs to confront its demons and the conservative complaint that “you can’t say anything anymore.”)
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But “The Real World” really did try to deliver on it, at least in the early years, before the series devolved into a hot-tub party machine. The opening titles’ promise of “getting real” may have been marketing. It was a constructed environment it put its fish in a bowl, not the open ocean, and waited for them to battle or to mate. Cast and crew alike are figuring out the rules of the new genre and the boundaries of the fourth wall.įor sure, there was more artifice to the series than in the cinema-vérité documentaries, like PBS’s “An American Family,” that inspired it. There’s a raw, earnest documentary feel, even as the producers prime the action with gambits like a getaway trip to Jamaica. The series looks much different, and not just in the grunge and hip-hop fashions or the Gen X baby faces of the cast. 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.
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What if they hook up? What about the bathrooms? (They, as it turned out, were camera-free.)įorty “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. 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. Gather ’round, children, and let Grandpa Gen X tell you what life was like back in nineteen-dickety-ninety-two, when telephones were tethered to the wall by wires, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them and reality TV was something new and shocking.īefore 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.”
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