Given the number of times it was hyped and replayed during MTV’s other programs, even the network’s casual viewers could not have missed the signature moment of last winter’s season of the channel’s emblematic program, “The Real World.” During the second episode, in a casino Whirlpool on the Las Vegas strip, Trishelle, the full-figured airhead from the bayou whose mother died when Trishelle was 14, moseyed across the hot tub to Brynn, the all-American party girl from rural Washington state, and started kissing and groping her. Steven, the straight guy working to put himself through business school by tending a gay bar, turned to the camera and gave it an unmistakable what’s-a-guy-to-do? look. Then he joined in.
The girl-on-girl action gave the moment a certain edgy salaciousness that had eluded dramatic high points of previous editions of the show, most of which involved too-drunk cast members stumbling about. It also lacked something else, more important for the nation’s first reality television program: any element of plausible reality.
“The Real World” gave birth to the entire genre of reality television, and it has taken on everything that many people have come to hate about such programs: a lowest-common-denominator, near-pornographic sensibility and the pervasive sense that we are not watching real people or events, but something soap-operatic and staged. But in its early years, when the program was at least a little bit better, “The Real World” embodied the sorts of characteristics that fueled reality television’s extraordinary rise to popularity: the intensely personal dramas, the vivid characters and the sense (as was the case on “Survivor” or “American Idol”) of the almost-attainable-exotic, the notion that we were seeing a world that we did not quite belong to, but wished we did.
MTV made its name by beaming an edgy version of urban cool to middle-American teens, which put it in the position of preaching to its audience, or at least to those suburban kids who already dreamt of the big city. “The Real World” was a crucial part of this image, and it also let the network document for its viewers one way in which adolescents become adults—a topic of eternal interest to the teenaged audience. But MTV now uses the show to broadcast a much different narrative of how to grow up: spring break, hook-ups and drunkenness. This is much closer to the experiences and fantasies of most teenagers. This new image has won MTV more viewers—the network and “The Real World” are both more popular than they ever have been. But as MTV has revamped its notion of what is cool, it has thrown its aspirational message down the Whirpool drain.
Hip to be square
When MTV launched in 1981, the New York-based network aired nearly 24 hours of music videos, interspersed with stunts of the sort that snarky, with-it New Yorkers would play on a clueless nation. There was a phone-in contest to win a Prince concert in your hometown, whose winner was a Mormon girl from rural Utah (the concert occasioned loud local protests). It force-fed the nation Madonna, at the time an unknown party girl from the Lower East Side who ran with Andy Warhol. MTV sent a young, cute drag queen out on tour with Van Halen, and laughed as the oblivious California rockers repeatedly hit on him (or her).
This sensibility appealed to certain adolescents, and MTV’s viewership grew fast and furious. The network, which then saw itself as “cutting-edge,” embraced new cultural developments that more mainstream outlets eyed warily. For example, when “Yo, MTV Raps!” went on the air in 1988, hip hop was still largely an underground phenomenon from which big record labels and radio stations shied away, but MTV recognized that it was bound to be a very big deal.
By the early ‘90s, the network had raised its sense of social conscience and saw its role as a political and cultural cluing-in point for youth hungry to be in touch with the broader world. MTV News grew more sophisticated—no longer content just to detail the minor adventures of celebrities, it sent correspondent Tabitha Soren to report from the presidential campaign trail in 1992. The network’s “Rock the Vote” campaign for youth voter registration was high-profile, so much so that then-candidate Bill Clinton took advantage of the opportunity to reach new young voters by starring as the sole guest of an MTV election special where teenagers questioned him. Liberal establishment types, who had spent the ’80s wagging adult fingers at MTV, later hailed the network’s public service messages such as “get involved,” and “wear a condom.”
The music also had political dimensions, from the militant black empowerment rap group Public Enemy to didactic liberals like Pearl Jam and R.E.M. to the feminist strummers of the Lilith Fair. Although you sometimes got the sense that MTV had gotten itself into a public position it didn’t really know how to handle—such as when a flirty blonde asked candidate Clinton whether he preferred boxers or briefs—there was also something charming about the network’s earnest agenda. For all the tiresome chatter about Generation X’s ironic, disengaged, navel-fixated brooding, it was nice to see MTV plunging its teenaged viewers into the real world, complete with ideas, politics and consequences.
Reality bites
To a certain extent, MTV’s decline has been mirrored—maybe even forecasted—by the changes to its signature programming franchise, “The Real World.” The premise of the first show, which debuted in 1992, was to put a microscope to the lives of seven young people who had moved to New York in order to make it in the entertainment industry: an aspiring model, a rapper, a dancer, a critic, an artist and a singer. The show worked because these were real people, doing real things and encountering the new and unexpected.
From the beginning critics said that the fantasy of “The Real World” presented was deeply parochial. A “Saturday Night Live” skit at the time depicted the show as a lot of whiny 20somethings in flannels arguing over who had to feed the fish—and they were right, it was parochial. But for Generation X, life itself was pretty small-minded, and the parochial ideal that MTV was selling (your hip 20s) was a whole lot better than the parochial culture we were involved in (middle school).
Unlike teenagers who were (and still are) the program’s target demographic, the show’s characters were in their mid-20s. They had clearly defined and articulated ideas of what they wanted to do with their lives and they were trying to get there. In the first four seasons, the overarching, propulsive drama was that of people starting to immerse themselves in quasi-adult lives and careers, and the episodes documented the ways in which their experiences corrupted or emboldened their original notions of who they were.
But “The Real World” has since changed its formula dramatically. No longer an outlet for 20somethings to brood about their future careers, the show has become a cyclic three-month on-air party for young adults to mingle in hot tubs and obsess about the present. The locales have changed from creative meccas like New York and London to vacation spots like Las Vegas, New Orleans and Hawaii. MTV has rejiggered the show to require characters to engage in artificial, season-long contests or projects—like putting together a fashion show—which the characters embrace in the way most American teenagers experience spring break: as a big party.
The houses, which started off as funky lofts, have become ludicrously large and fancy fantasy palaces: the top floor of the Palms Hotel, a chateau in Paris. The characters don’t even look like real people anymore. They are far, far too attractive, the guys all balled-up pecs and biceps and the girls all slim, languorous limbs. The show never depicted ugly people, but the characters, in the beginning, had the luxury of being only ordinary looking. By Las Vegas, the cast looked like refugees from a workout video.
From the beginning, the casts of “The Real World” seemed to be assembled through a fairly transparent quota system, which basically remains in place today. Most casts featured a series of archetypes: the urbane gay guy, the outspoken black woman (chip displayed prominently on shoulder), the wacky white guy, the sweet middle-American girl, the hick. In the early episodes, these differences seemed more authentic, and mutable: When the hick and the outspoken black woman spoke to one another, for instance, you could feel their perceptions shifting. Now, the characters seem to wear their backgrounds like proud, stubborn labels, and their interactions on the show only force them deeper into their own archetypes. The characters, it seems, are just trying to leverage their appearances into future television gigs.
And as their appearances and attitudes changed, their concerns took on a corresponding, adolescent irrelevance: The Hawaii cast’s Amaya worried about her large breasts and endlessly asked Colin to please be a little nicer to her; Kaia spent the season wondering whether she was bisexual.
Welcome to the new MTV.
I want my MTV…back!
In a 1999 article in The New York Times Magazine, critic Marshall Sella was moved to write: “All in all, MTV seems to envision daily life as an endless game of pool in which people antagonize each other, then storm off to points unknown.” But the same focus on teenage dramas and concerns that critics deplored has, in fact, brought more young viewers to the network. After facing declining ratings in the mid-1990s, the network hired executives Van Toffler and Brian Graden to give MTV’s programming a facelift.
Their brief was to reduce reliance on music videos to increase the ratings among the target young audience. “[In the early ’90s] we had influential content, influential music, things were changing, but we had low, low ratings,” Judy McGrath, onetime MTV president, told New York magazine this summer. “Back then, our steady diet was a lot of leading-edge stuff, and not a ton of people were watching.”
So Graden and Toffler made the network look more like its viewers. They introduced “Total Request Live,” which became the network’s signature program—a phone-in-and-vote show that gives teenage music fans exactly what they ask for. The tastes of the young TRL voters, who vote incessantly from home for their favorite groups—mostly benign-imaged, dull-as-vanilla teen-pop acts like Britney Spears, ‘NSync, O-Town or Jessica Simpson—also pushed those same groups even higher on the playlist for all of MTV’s programming.
The network added a host of new reality programs. “Sorority Life” and “Fraternity Life” detail the weepy, vomit-soaked ins and outs of college life. “True Life” shows hour-long documentaries about typical teenage problems: a girl who’s too fat to make the cheerleading squad, a workout-obsessed boy trying desperately to beef up. “Spring Break: Undercover” tracks hyper-fit college students as they get drunk and contrive to hook up in party locales like Cancun. “Jackass” is a series of gross-out skater-punk tricks and stunts, the sort of stuff that bored suburban teens might pull in their spare time.
Now the network’s programming effectively mimics the lives and experiences of its viewers. The shift in programming has helped MTV’s ratings climb for five consecutive years, and more people now watch the network than ever before.
Some critics complain that this dumbing-down reflects an attempt to lure a younger audience. This is true in part, but not completely. The average age of the network’s viewer is slightly over 20 years old, which is not much different than what it has been throughout the network’s history. And though critics (and the network’s executives) have pointed to shows like “Total Request Live” as evidence that MTV is catering to a younger audience, even shows like “The Real World,” which executives say are meant for a general audience, have gone through these significant changes. The crucial variable may not be age, but aspiration.
MTV has always pursued teenagers. What has changed is the sort of teenagers it is chasing, and what ideal of cool it established to court them. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the network tried to convert its viewers, suggesting to hungry-for-hipness suburban teens that there was something out there cooler and more compelling than their own high school melodramas. The gospel has since changed. What MTV is selling its teen audience now (with “Sorority Life,” “Fraternity Life,” “Spring Break: Cancun,” a more juvenile “Real World”) is a bland vision of the immediate future in which the first years of college look pretty much like high school, but without parents or homework. The focus is on having fun, not on being challenged by new or different experiences.
Of course, it’s a little sentimental to pine for the early days of a television program that probably was never all that good in the first place. Certainly, the first few seasons of “The Real World” could be brooding, reflective and static. In a way, the new version of MTV is being more honest with its audience, the hot tub threesome incident aside. Most of its viewers were never likely to move to the big city to hobnob with rock stars, run voter-registration drives and think deeply about their world. Most of its viewers, by contrast, will likely go to college and party.
But that promise of cultural revolution held out in MTV’s early years was enticing, glamorous and, for some teenagers, useful. It let them imagine possibilities for their future that they might not otherwise have seen so vividly. The grunge generation has gotten a bad rap, but the early ‘90s was a hopeful moment for young people. MTV’s vision of current youth culture, which has drawn more viewers to the network, is by contrast bland and unremarkable.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells is an editor of The Washington Monthly, where this piece first appeared.