The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 08
“I used to work for the phone company.” - Ryan
While not as dramatically charged as the presence of narcotics in the home of a recovering pillhead, one of this season’s important subplots is the continued and curious absence of Eric. Ashlee isn’t exactly getting a lot of press earlier, but what is going on with Eric is more confusing. Ashlee is trying to get her licks in - she drives the roommates around, is quick to sit by the computer and offer her judgmental two cents, and has no problem loaning a hoodie to a roommate who is too lazy/tired/drunk to put on some g-ddamn clothes already - but I just can’t bring myself to give a rip about anything she says or does.
The situation with Eric is different. Other than a few minutes chronicling his topical, boring and ultimately unsuccessful courtship with Sahar, he has been almost completely absent through eight hour-long episodes. Obviously pissbrush-gate and white-boy-virginity-gate and I-don’t-know-how-to-work-or-keep-track-of-this-audio-recorder-gate gave the producers plenty of celluose with which to work, but one has to believe that there is something else to blame for his lack of screen time. And is it a coincidence that the last time we saw something like this - a character truly falling off the face The Real World - was the last time the show was set in the Crescent City?
The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 07
“The kitchen is where the food is and I want to eat my food.” - Knight
A few days before Super Bowl XLIV, a rumor started going around that the Real World cast may be watching the big game at the Rusty Nail. The Rusty Nail is my home away from home, so when I caught wind of this potentially disastrous development, I predictably freaked out and marched on over to get some answers.
Thankfully, the lovely Cyndi was behind the bar and my friend Scott was in attendance when I stormed into the Nail with an axe to grind. Cyndi assured me that although MTV producers had approached the proprietors about potentially allowing the roommates to stop by on Sunday, the terms of the arrangement were respectfully declined. Having been successfully talked off the ledge, I grabbed a PBR and started to catch my breath when Scott posed what turned out to be a very thought provoking question.
“What if the Real World did spend an evening here? Obviously no one wants them jamming up a Super Bowl party, but would seeing the interior of The Rusty Nail on TV a few months from now be the worst thing in the world?”
The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 06
“He’s a weird kid, and weird kids freak me out.” - Jemmye
This week’s episode contains footage from the only evening in which I crossed paths with the show’s cast or crew. It was March 13, 2010 and I was down on Frenchman Street covering the inaugural Foburg Music Festival. Just as The Revivalists were about to take the stage for their headlining spot at Blue Nile, the roommates stormed into the club followed by a production team fully-equipped with cameras, boom mics and light sticks. The whole lot of them posted up in the area of the venue that serves as the main thoroughfare to both the bar and the bathroom, and the roomies spent the better part of the first set with their backs to the stage, yelling in the ears of fame-balling strangers as a killer rock show raged behind them.
My interactions with the gang were thankfully sparse and mostly unspectacular: I let a PA know exactly where he could stick his request to “share” my barstool when he was looking to get a better shot, and when Sahar asked me what I was doing when I grabbed a plastic cup from behind the bar and filled it with the remainder of my bottled beer as I headed to d.b.a. to catch Rotary Downs, I let her know I was aware of how long she had been in New Orleans and found it hard to believe she was unfamiliar with the concept of a “geaux cup.” Maybe I shouldn’t have been so curt with Sahar, but you have to appreciate exactly how ridiculous she looked in that neon green cowboy hat.
The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 05
“If he feels froggy and leaps, we will have an issue.” - Preston
I’ve got to admit, I’m running out of steam. Maybe it is because I used up my weekly quota of self-righteousness at Bridge Lounge’s weekly trivia night, ranting about what I perceived, under a cloak of frustration over my own intellectual shortcomings (not to mention about 15 High Lifes), to be a blatant antisemitic slant running through the evening’s questions. Maybe it is because the heat and humidity in this town is slowing turning my brain to mush. But it is probably because the most recent episode of The Real World was really lame.
Based on the previews I’ve seen all season, I recognize that this may just be a calm before the storm - we’ve still got ass-cigarettes, piss-brushes and Schedule II narcotics floating around the house willy-nilly - but that does not excuse wasting over one half of one hour on Jemmye’s decision to pursue a legitimate relationship with Knight over staying faithful to her “boyfriend” back home.
The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 04
“Let’s put on some reggae jams and just chill out.” - McKenzie
I’ve got to hand it to MTV. While they are getting worse and worse at capturing the nuances of the human condition, this is the second week in a row that version of New Orleans that appeared on screen was pretty darn close to the way things really are down here. The prelude to and aftermath of the Saints’ Super Bowl victory was nothing short of life-affirmingly awesome. The type of douchebag date-rapist you meet at a shitbox like The Beach on Bourbon would feel right at home at the hell-hole that is Monkey Hill. And a trip to The Boot isn’t complete until you meet at least one girl with a visible sore on her lip. Yep, they’ve got this place pretty well pegged. But as their portrait of a city that can conceivably be painted in any number of ways continues to impress, their chronicle of people interacting with even a baseline level of dignity continues to disappoint.
Even back when the first group of strangers moved into the SoHo loft that hosted The Real World’s inaugural season, truly combative discussions about race were already obsolete among young adults of a certain age. In 1992 - just as is the case today - if someone in their early 20s had ass-backward views on race-relations, he or she would rightfully be dismissed as a simple-minded bigot. Sure, every now and then a cast member gets busted perpetrating an offensive stereotype, but treatises on race have rarely gone beyond “Not all black people with pagers are drug dealers” and have rarely needed to. MTV knows enough to know that putting an unabashed racist in close quarters with anything other than a bunch of unabashed racists would be disastrous (and not at all engaging).
And because any modern conversations about religion and gender roles should be doubly innocuous lest they come off as comically heavy-handed, the only issue consistently ripe for meaningful discussion - both “meaningful” and “discussion” being used extremely liberally for the lack of more accurate terms - has been the cast members’ differing attitudes towards various sexual orientations. Over the years, the subject has been handled with a wildly inconsistent level of sensitivity - on the part of the cast and the producers alike - and this season it appears as though the Wheel of Tact has landed squarely on “Race to the Bottom.”
The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 03
“I don’t give a fudge what anybody thinks.” - Knight
Despite what many people think, Mardi Gras isn’t some devil weed that transforms ordinary people into stark-raving-mad lunatics who drunkenly lurch around New Orleans fueled by an insatiable thirst for cheap, plastic beads and their own depraved desperation. While the level and frequency of one’s intoxication may be slightly above average for the two or so weeks that parades run down St. Charles Avenue, the scale of Mardi Gras debauchery seldom reaches wide-scale and wanton corruption of moral decency.
The true phenomenon was very accurately documented in the episode of Treme that was set on Fat Tuesday proper. Even though alcohol and drug use was prevalent, few - if any - of the characters behaved in a way that was totally unexpected. Sure, the drinkers started drinking earlier, the smokers smoked more often and the cokeheads did coke under less sanitary conditions, but even the expanded revelry for which the season is notorious was shown to have limits. Mardi Gras is crazy and people do cut loose, but the mere fact that Easter is nigh does not turn virgins into sluts, sluts into boozehounds or boozehounds into crackheads.
Given the fact that no one had to be rushed to the hospital or took part in a PCP fueled street orgy, I’d say MTV has given the holiday a pretty fair shake so far. There was, however, something about this week’s episode that I did manage to find extremely troubling.
The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 02
“Everything is genetics more than it is environmental.” - Jemmye
This may be the last one of these recaps I write because this week’s episode of The Real World may very well be the last time I watch an episode from this season. Hell, this may be the last time I watch The Real World at all. This episode made me sick, and it wasn’t just because the first 15 minutes revolved around Ryan’s fondness for squeezing his roommate’s ears and blow drying his own crotch.
MTV producers have tweaked the tried and true formula they use to manufacture drama on the network’s reality programs by supplementing their already suspect practice of feeding an endless supply of adult beverages to emotional cripples with a conscious attempt to knock a recovering opiate addict clear off the wagon. After what appeared to be the flawless execution of a textbook B&E, Ryan is afflicted with a shoulder injury of unknown origin that inexplicably requires an emergency trip to Touro and a prescription for codeine.
The next day, Ryan has no problem eating a sandwich while piloting an automobile. While I’d be hard pressed to think of a time when I haven’t been eating a sandwich as I made my way from one destination to another, the non-sandwich-holding arm on which I relied to rip the neutral ground U-Turns and pothole avoidance maneuvers necessary to get anywhere in this city was firing on all cylinders. I’m no “Dr. Matt,” but I think Ryan is full of shit.
The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 01
“Boom! Let’s pose!” - Preston
In the months before and during the filming of this season, I made a pretty big stink about MTV coming back to the Crescent City. Not since Real World: Seattle has a season of the show made the host city look like anything more than an hedonistic enabler for a group of bilzer-brained chuckleheads’ desire to drink alcohol in a manner that most people outgrow by the time they graduate high school. While I quickly discovered that New Orleans nightlife has more to offer than over sized beers and cheesy cover bands on Bourbon Street, it would be disingenuous to act like these things do not exist or that some people do not like that type of stuff. But after a noteworthy season of Treme gave America a glimpse of the magnificent splendor that is found on some of the other sides of New Orleans, I will be disappointed if MTV spends 13 weeks chronicling the adventures of shitfaced attention whores as they pass out in a dark corner of Razoo.
Only time will tell how the Big Easy is portrayed during this go’round, but thankfully nothing came of my bigger, more pragmatic fear about a reality TV production crew descending on the city: I assumed it was only a matter of time before these clowns started showing up at my favorite bars and completely ruined my social life. I only crossed paths with the cast on one occasion, and while it was plenty annoying, my world did not come crashing down upon itself. So I guess that is something to build on, right?
