Much has been written about the landmark MTV reality series, “The Real World,” since its première, in 1992. The praise and critique often focus on what appears to be the show’s primary contribution to the world: the popularization of first-person confessional reality TV and the now-established millennial culture of self-discovery and self-disclosure. Whether you see this development as good or bad is very much tied to when you were born. Either way, with thirty seasons under its belt (and Season Thirty-One currently filming in Las Vegas), “The Real World” remains important as perhaps the longest-running human experiment captured by television cameras.
Despite various changes to the show’s format—the introduction of a “job” that all seven roommates must do together in Season Five (“Real World: Miami”), or the pairing of cast members with their exes in Season Twenty-Nine (“Real World: Ex-plosion”) or the forced revelation of cast secrets in Season Thirty (“Real World: Skeletons”)—the basic goal of “The Real World” has remained consistent. The series casts young people who, all evidence to the contrary, have clear visions of themselves and their place in the world, and then forces them to interact with other, equally polarizing identities.
In Season Twenty, for example, Kim, a white Southern Christian, urges her African-American roommate, Brianna, to “not get ghetto” when the two engage in an argument. Kim also implies that Brianna comes from a mythical place known as “Blackville.” What’s the value of forcing someone like Kim to live with someone like Brianna in this televised crucible of diversity? Ratings, of course, but “The Real World” also implies a belief that bearing witness to difference somehow creates tolerance. And the show depicts intolerance as stemming directly from identity. One is racist because one is from the South. One is sexist because one is a male jock. Just mix, shake, and film.
Each season, “The Real World” offers us the pleasures of a melodrama in the wholesome packaging of social science. But the show’s origins are less in PBS’s “An American Family,” from 1971_,_ the first serialized reality series, and more in line with the earliest American reality programming, especially Alan Funt’s “Candid Camera,” from 1948. The first reality-TV audiences saw the genre as a high-minded use of modern technology for the greater good. The scholar Anna McCarthy writes how “Candid Camera” was thought to be “a valuable and educational visual record, capable of providing a critical analysis of modern society within mass culture.” Funt’s hidden cameras and the behaviors they uncovered linked up with the work of prominent sociologists of the time, such as Stanley Milgram, the lead researcher behind the notorious Yale obedience experiments.
In 1977, Milgram even wrote a paper about Funt’s program, citing its value for understanding human behavior in controlled circumstances. The success of “Candid Camera” was inextricable from postwar America’s newfound obsession with unlocking the motivations behind why people do what they do. The trauma of the Second World War led to the hope that hidden cameras and carefully constructed scenarios might unlock the secret to human behavior, both good and evil. Voyeurism was to answer all of our questions; reality television would help us know the unknowable.
With ratings lagging and critics raging, Bunim/Murray Productions made some key changes to the franchise. They abandoned the convention of hiding the cinematic apparatus—camera crews and producers are now visible on screen for the first time outside of a blooper reel. The offering of “more real” realness is a tried-and-true MTV tactic for saving a flailing reality franchise. (We also see the apparatus in “Teen Mom OG” and the final season of “The Hills.”) But more depressing for “Real World” fans is how the show recently abandoned its iconic opening credit voice-over, a patchwork of voices from each of the seven cast members reciting the famous words “This is a true story of seven strangers picked to live in a house and find out what happens when people stop being polite and starting getting real.” But don’t let the new opening and the onscreen camera crews deceive—the show is still doing the same thing it’s always done. Like Funt and Milgram, Bunim/Murray Productions continues to select test subjects who they feel will illuminate some aspect of humanity. But what, exactly, is being illuminated?
Jon Dovey writes about how reality-TV programming affects the way we understand the very concepts of truth and authenticity. With the rise and dominance of reality television over the last twenty-five years comes the concomitant belief that humanity is knowable via the investigative camera, the first-person essay, and the webcam confessional. Dovey writes, “Statements about the world no longer have any purchase unless they are embodied, relative and particular rather than totalizing, general and unified.” Indeed, MTV traffics in the self—it rolls out a seemingly endless list of personal stories, unique identities, which are, nonetheless, ultimately generic and universalized.
Perhaps this is what MTV has brought us in thirty seasons of hot-tub parties and blurry night-vision footage of under-the-sheets trysts that everyone regrets in the morning—it has helped train us to see our daily lives as a continual acting out of identity in public. We take a Buzzfeed quiz to find out which “Scandal” character we are. We purchase wearable electronics that prompt us to become our best selves. We monitor and update and photograph and pin and like and post. Just as Bunim and Murray always wanted, we’re all finding out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.
