It was nineteen years ago that I got a desperate early morning call. A group of young women living downtown were on deadline to finish a short film about a band trying to make it at South by Southwest and their Avid editing program had frozen.
I called David Hartstein, then a UT film grad student, to rush over. When he arrived, the panicked women were gathered in a circle, staring blankly at the computer monitor while their male housemates, supposedly making the film with them, were passed out drunk on the living room floor. David took one look at the computer, pressed a single key, and the program came back to life. The day was saved. The film soon finished. And you can watch it all in an episode of The Real World: Austin where I was the on-air “boss.”
It was 2005 when MTV’s then wildly popular reality show, The Real World, filmed a season in Austin. For me, Emily Nussbaum’s new book, Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV (Random House, 2024) and her concurrent New Yorker piece, “How the Real World Created Reality TV,” whose focus is on the importance of The Real World in creating the reality form, brought back the memories.
A hot, sexy drama about young people – without having to pay any writers.
In her New Yorker article, Nussbaum makes a compelling case for how The Real World “established the look and rhythm of modern reality TV, pioneering the key tropes” of the genre following its 1992 premier. The show’s co-creators, Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, were inspired by their memories of the 1970s groundbreaking PBS series An American Family (yes, on PBS!) a 12-part unscripted series unlike anything on TV then. The subject Loud family, in Santa Barbara, California, literally let it all hang out on camera. Mom asked Dad for a divorce on-camera (while having an affair with one of the filmmakers off-camera). There were five teenage kids, including Lance Loud who came out, the first openly gay person on television (who later fronted a punk band, wearing a sailor suit, where I saw him in a small bar up in Massachusetts). The series made the cover of Newsweek and inspired Albert Brooks’ spoof movie Real Life.
Murray and Bunim pitched MTV on “a hot, sexy drama about young people – without having to pay any writers,” with plots emerging from conflicts found within hundreds of hours of footage. MTV bit and filming began in a Manhattan loft over the Memorial Day weekend in 1991. A subsequent better thought-out pilot, with a new cast, followed the next year, shot with just two cameras, a few confessional interviews a week, a few rule-breaking hookups, and a final scene where the housemates broke into the control room and filmed the production crew. Once aired, the series became a blockbuster success.
The Real World house in Austin was located on the corner of Third Street and San Jacinto, 8,000 square feet of living space decorated by a local designer to look, in an Austin American-Statesman description, as “a Jetsons feel with a bit of a cowboy flair.” There was a hot tub outside, 35 cameras (including ones in the showers, bathrooms, over each bed, and underwater in their indoor pool), along with a confessional booth in a place where even the most private thoughts were never private. Behind a huge wall dividing the house, MTV staff sat in front of monitors connected to the cameras 24 hours a day, recording everything.
What do I remember? I make documentaries, but after following and filming folks for many years, it felt crazy to finally to be surrounded by cameras myself. Sometimes two cameras at a time!
Doing my best to ignore their presence, we really put in an honest effort to teach the kids to make something they’d be proud of in the few months they had to work. While I got increasingly frustrated with MTV’s producers being so clearly manipulative, desperate to create on-air conflict, I got used to the fact that this was “reality,” and not documentary.
The kids were very young, pretty immature, not much into working very hard, and partying and fighting a lot, no doubt why years later The Real World: Austin was voted the most popular season of the series.
In the reality show blogs, I was dismissed as the maker of many films, none of which they’d ever heard of.
As for me, in the reality show blogs I was dismissed as the maker of many films, none of which they’d ever heard of, and I was described as looking like the love child of Michael Dukakis and Art Garfunkel. Yes, fame hurts.
In the very first episode, Texas Film Hall of Famer John Pierson descended on a crane to introduce the season, and it was on. The Real Worlders actually made a watchable little video, though MTV opted to not show it, following them on a final Mexican holiday instead. Two decades later, the carnage and chaos and romance of the youngsters let loose on Austin is all out there to watch online.
Today, Austin’s Real World house is now Vince Young Steakhouse. The Real World franchise finally folded a decade ago. The youngsters all transitioned into relatively nondescript lives, with the hot kids, Melinda and Danny inevitably marrying and, just as inevitably, divorcing.
As Nussbaum writes, The Real World gave its producers the blockbuster hit they’d always dreamed of. Murray followed up with the Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie vehicle The Simple Life and the even bigger Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The variations on the reality format that sprung up, from Real Housewives to The Amazing Race to The Bachelor, Survivor, The Great British Bake Off, and the show that had a profound impact on American politics, The Apprentice, are now the mainstream.
Murray doesn’t see his achievement as inventing a new kind of television. He says he was creating a new kind of viewer. As Nussbaum writes, “For a generation that had grown up with The Real World, reality TV wasn’t a compromise, some crummy stopgap when scripted TV wasn’t available.” It became must-see in a world of posted videos gone viral. As for our culture, well, we all live the real world now.
Paul Stekler is professor emeritus and former head of department at UT Radio-Television-Film. His films and series include George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire, Last Man Standing: Politics, Texas Style, and Vote for Me: Politics in America. Stekler’s latest project is The Stars in Their Eyes, an upcoming documentary about a year at the McDonald Observatories in the Davis Mountains of West Texas.
Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum (hardcover, pp 464, $30) is available now from Random House.
This article appears in July 19 • 2024.