Recovering Baptist

I must have been a sophomore at GT when it started. And my friends thought I was nuts; I was embarrassed to tell them about it. Actually, I’m embarrassed to write about it now. I was a fan of the first few seasons of MTV’s The Real World. All of my friends thought I was crazy. Who would want to watch a show that consisted of following people my age around their everyday lives? But that first season, and actually the first three or so, were better than everyone thought. As this article shows (hat tip to digg; I don’t normally read this site), back then the people involved viewed it as a sort of documentary. And those of us watching it kind of thought of it that way, too.

Back in 1992 there was nothing like it on TV. MTV was in its transition from actually playing music to doing anything but. None of us had heard of reality TV, and the closest thing to it were “talk” shows like Oprah and Jerry Springer. Cops did come first, but it offered a series of vignettes rather than any sense of story or characters. As for “normal” programming, The Simpsons was making Fox a “real” network, but honestly, the only other Gen-X (a phrase none of us knew then) show on TV was Mystery Science Theater 3000.

It’s easy to overlook the importance of that first group of seven strangers, but consider that everything from Survivorman to Trading Spaces in some way traces its roots to that show. Of course, we also have it to blame for the awfulness of Wife Swap, Super Nanny, and Hannah Montana. Who knows if the networks would have had the guts to air Survivor if MTV hadn’t taken that risk eight years earlier.

Today’s version of the show bears almost no resemblance to the first few seasons. Like so many other shows on that network, The Real World now borders on soft-core porn. It’s hard to remember that there was a time when the plot centered around something other than who was sleeping under whose covers. And it was everyone’s hopes, dreams, and personal struggles that drew me to the show. That, and I saw the future of television. Honestly. It had nothing to do with having a crush on Julie. Nothing at all. Nor that I had a thing for girls from Birmingham. Nope. I just knew how to spot a twenty-season running show from the start. Yeah.

I think she was a dancer…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.