In the days before everyone cultivated a personal brand on social media, it really was unclear what constant mediation and all-consuming self-awareness could do to someone. But, while these initial tranches of strangers tended to be young creatives hoping to gain some career exposure, it is also clear that, for several seasons, the roommates were relative innocents – neither as polished nor as willing to debase themselves as we now expect of the ‘talent’ in these setups. Of course, we now know the genre is highly performative, a stream of artifice both cynical and sentimental. When the series debuted in 1992, documentary verité was hardly new as an artistic premise, but the showrunners’ conceit was: to throw seven strangers into a house, subject them to persistent surveillance and exact regular diaristic ‘confessionals’. The strength of this spinoff is that it delivers on the show’s initial promise to function as a social experiment. Courtesy: © Danielle Levitt/MTV and Paramount+ Yet, last week, as I watched the final episode of The Real World Homecoming: Los Angeles – which premiered in September 2021, six months after The Real World Homecoming: New York – I felt an unnerving poignancy, of the kind that is all-but-impossible to muster in the face of most contemporary reality viewing. I did not expect much of The Real World Homecoming (2021–ongoing) beyond a bit of nostalgia and winking opportunism – of which there is plenty. Now careening into middle age, I was quickly drawn back in and noticed that the producers – Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray – had recently reunited the cast members of The Real World: New York (1992) and The Real World: Los Angeles (1993) to live together in their old digs for several weeks. As a teen living in the rural west of the US, I was mesmerized by the first season (downtown Manhattan) and the fourth (west London). Over the winter holiday, I subscribed to the Paramount+ streaming platform and discovered years of the show cached there, like boxes of embarrassing Polaroids from high school. It is now something of a mainstay and a quaint throwback: reality television 1.0. In a time before the current infinitudes of ‘choice’ content, a 23-installment season was appointment viewing, then relentlessly rerun as marathons throughout the summer. The Real World (1992–2019) debuted on the cable network MTV, which had reached cultural saturation among younger adults during the primordial years of the internet in the early 1990s.
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