RSSSecks Changes
Mar 16
Society and Culture, Television Sex Comments Off
The Real World got me thinking. I know, strange. On Sunday, MTV aired The Real World Brooklyn marathon and what surprised me is that the cast seemed very “real.” The show in the last, oh at least ten seasons, has seemed very contrived. But this time, the over-sexed castmates came off as immature, whiny, vain and kind of stupid. And I thought, you know, that’s actually a pretty accurate reflection of the new generation of twenty-somethings.
It occurred me to that The Real World is grossly responsible for the societal shift to this kind of sexed-out, twenty-four a day spring break culture (no joke, Season 22 is in Cancun!) Oh sure, spring break behavior is nothing new, but it used to be reasonably contained to spring break, even on MTV. The Real World, long before other reality shows came along, popularized this sort of vain, vacant, pop stars in the making mentality that has dominated its casting for at least the last ten years (I’m looking at you, Tek). They gave up on casting intelligent, mature young men and women with actual lives around season 8. After that, you had to be gorgeous, stupid and have nothing better to do with your life than The Real World.
I guess that manufactured cultural identity was taken for real by its viewers and now The Real World really does mirror a generation that is just mirroring what it had seen on television. That. is fucking scary.
This time around, producers went back to an old school model of letting the cast kind of do their own thing for most of the season. The whole notion of having them work together always seemed unnecessarily contrived to me; I actually approve of the switch back this season. A startlingly number of them as a result (no surprise) wanted to be models/actors which is probably the most realistic reason for them to have tried out for the show in the first place. After all, no matter what Beauty and the Geek pretends to be, reality television hasn’t been about social experiment for a long time now.
The Real World hasn’t been entertaining to me since before they parked themselves in Las Vegas. But this season took on a fascinating social context, (ironic, I know) because the cast’s behavior and attitudes seemed real and believable. I wonder if that isn’t how we expect kids to act these days. Over-sexed, over-stimulated, overreacting. It’s the overdrive generation. And while The Real World didn’t create the overdrive generation single-handedly, the show deserves at least some of the blame. Yeah, producers would just say they are a reflection of what is going on in society. But I don’t buy it. Sometimes, it really is the other way around.
