The series looks very different, and not just in grunge and hip-hop fashion or in the cast of Generation X children’s faces. There is a raw and sincere feeling of documentary, even when the producers prepare the action with tricks like an escape trip to Jamaica. The cast and crew are discovering the rules of the new genre and the limits of the fourth wall.
Certainly, there was more artifice in the series than in the cinema-vérité documentaries, such as “An American Family” by PBS, which inspired it. It was a built environment; he put his fish in an aquarium, not in the open ocean, and expected them to fight or mate.
The promise of the initial titles to “stay real” may have been marketing. But “The Real World” really tried to deliver that, at least in the early years, before the series turned into a hot party machine. (In a way, the “make it real” creed also foreshadowed today’s cultural wars, echoing both the progressive spirit that society needs to face its demons and the conservative claim that “you can’t say any more.”)
That first season established many reality show conventions, such as the “confessional” interviews that are now routine. It also established the expectation that a cast of “Mundo Real” would encompass different origins, races and sexual orientations (Norman Korpi, an artist of the 1st season, is gay), at a time when TV tended to be more diverse among programs than inside them.
Two years later, in 1994, “Friends” would form a totally heterosexual white social group in a Manhattan of cafes and idyllic real estate. In the same year, “The Real World: San Francisco” introduced AIDS activist Pedro Zamora, who would be the first person that some of the viewers would know to die from the disease.
The program’s diversity was also an evolution for MTV. The young artists of “The Real World: New York” included Andre Comeau, a white rocker, as well as Heather B. Gardner, a black rapper. But the channel had a history, since it started in 1981, of segregating or ignoring black artists, something David Bowie said in a famous 1983 interview with MTV.