My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [111]
The Real World: New York is, or rather was, the utopia of reality television. The next season in Los Angeles was a fine follow-up with another totally diverse cast. They dealt with issues of violence and alcoholism and politics. And everyone still had normal names like Beth and Glen and David, and not one of them had been surgically enhanced. My passion for the show remained, but when it premiered, I’d managed to move back to campus, so I didn’t afford it the importance of season one.
I wondered if the show might lose a touch of its original magic in the third iteration, but then San Francisco premiered. There was an urgency to that season, as cast member Pedro passed away from HIV complications the night of the premiere. Conflicts were amplified by Pedro’s looming illness, and relationships were shattered when common ground could not be found. The house was rife with misunderstandings, and everyone was on edge from the first episode. If New York was the utopia of reality television, San Francisco was the perfect storm.
By the time the London came on, I was dating Fletch, who’d developed a distaste for all things MTV. He claimed that the show held no value, but I suspect he was just jealous he’d turned twenty-five and missed the opportunity to audition.
When the Miami season rolled around, I’d graduated from college and was working my first professional job. I mostly caught up with the show during the weekend marathons. Suddenly watching a bunch of college kids lying around on couches and bitching about who had moved their stuff stopped being “must-see” TV.216 With the exception of cast member Dan that season, the series ceased to interest me. I only kept watching because I was addicted.
I planned on quitting cold turkey when they went back to New York. I couldn’t relate to any of the cast members. Yeah, I laughed at some of their antics, but the show was intrinsically different by then. The first season was almost the next generation of The Breakfast Club. They were people who’d been tossed together and who’d forged uncommon friendships. Were it not for an in-school suspension, you’d never see criminal Bender and prom queen Claire making out in a file room or Claire giving basket case Allison a makeover. And in real life, you’d never find the flamboyantly gay Norman befriending Julie, the repressed Southern virgin who was so naive she assumed Heather B. was a drug dealer because she was an African-American woman with a beeper.
The further the feel of the episodes got from the originals, the less voraciously I watched. My interest waned as the number of boob jobs on the show waxed. The return to New York should have been the last season I tuned in, but then the Chicago season took up residence in spitting distance of me, and I had no choice.
And then the Real World went to Las Vegas . . . and that season was so distasteful that its hold on me finally broke. I’m not sure how episodes went from Julie camping out in a “Reaganville” for the night to understand the plight of a homeless family to roommate threesomes,217 but it did and I’d had enough.
I thought I’d successfully kicked my habit after the disease-infested, hot-tub-filled Las Vegas season in 2003, only to be sucked in by a snowy day, the appallingly amoral Denver cast, and the discovery of my cable box’s on-demand feature in 2006.
My Shame Rattle at being back on The Real World bandwagon was palpable.
Fortunately, it was short-lived.
I had enough self-respect to avoid Sydney, Hollywood, and Brooklyn, and when this latest season rolled around, I really believed I was home free.
So, what broke my resolve? What lured me back into the fold? What got me up on the Bunim-Murray horse again? I knew the show would never be as good as it once had been, so quality wasn’t a motivator. And I’d have laid money on the Cancún kids being the most vapid, self-indulgent group yet, wrapped in a cocoon of arrogance and ignorance and abs, none of which appealed to me.
What sucked me in this time?
Weather?