The series looks very different, and not just in the grunge and hip hop modes or the Gen X baby faces of the cast. There’s a raw, serious documentary feel, even though the producers are producing the action with gambling like a trip to Jamaica. Cast and crew are working out the rules of the new genre and the boundaries of the fourth wall.
There were definitely more artworks to the series than in the film-vérité documentaries, such as PBS’s ‘An American Family’ that inspired it. It was a built environment; it puts its fish in a bowl, not in the open ocean, and waits for them to fight or mate.
The promise of the opening titles to ‘get real’ was perhaps marketing. But ‘The Real World’ really tried to deliver it, at least in the early years, before the series turned into a hot-party party machine. (In a way, the ‘real’ credentials also foretold the contemporary cultural wars, as well as the progressive spirit that society needs to confront its demons, as well as the conservative complaint that ‘you can say nothing more’.
That first season drew up many reality TV conventions, such as the now-concerned “confession” interviews. It also created an expectation that a cast from the “real world” would include different backgrounds, races, and sexual orientations (Norman Korpi, an artist from Season 1, is gay), at a time when TV was more diverse as in the series. .
Two years later, in 1994, ‘Friends’ would bring together a completely straight, white social group in a Manhattan with coffee shops and idyllic real estate. That same year, ‘The Real World: San Francisco’ introduced AIDS activist Pedro Zamora, who would be the first person some viewers knew to die of the disease.
The variety of the program was also an evolution for MTV. The artistic youngsters of “The Real World: New York” include Andre Comeau, a white rocker, as well as Heather B. Gardner, a black rapper. But since its inception in 1981, the channel has had a history of separating or ignoring black artists, something David Bowie mentioned in a famous MTV interview in 1983.