I spent most of the weekend held hostage by a Real World marathon on MTV. At least I had an excuse this time – I had to tape the Boston season in its entirety for one of my writers – unlike the dozens of other times I’ve allowed the charms of “reality television” to lure my unsuspecting, lovingly-raised-on-reading-and-PBS brain cells siren-like to their deaths. Nothing pins me to the couch more firmly than an orgy of Bunim-Murray programming, particularly on, say, a rainy Saturday afternoon when the pint swilling of the previous evening has compromised the ability of the aforementioned brain cells to defend their delicate selves against the more poisonous dregs of pop culture, so that when the optic nerve presents them with an inverted image of Tami snarling for the umpteenth time that “it wasn’t not funny [sic],” the little cells do not band together in a burst of righteous indignation and send marching orders to the right thumb to change the channel to the Cartoon Network, but rather struggle weakly for only a moment before slumping face-down and depressed into a puddle of hops-tainted intercranial fluid and giving up the ghost. So there I lie, all afternoon, unable to move until the programming block ends, surrounded by crushed cigarette packets, empty soda cans, and the detritus of a BLT brunch that I ordered in from a diner and snatched out of the hands of the startled delivery guy, slamming the door in his face and leaving a twenty-dollar bill eddying gently in the hallway as I dashed back to the sofa, cats scattering before me.

I cannot think of a single reason why Real World should continue to fascinate me as it does. I have seen every episode hundreds of times. I know that the producers manipulate the footage. I loathe nearly every single cast member. And yet, there I sit, munching on a French fry and groaning “oh my GOD Kaia SHUT! UP!” at the TV and shoehorning all other activities – answering the phone, going to the bathroom – into the commercial breaks. Why, God? WHY?

Well, let’s face it – the spectacle of so-called “real people” behaving badly on camera holds a train-wreck-esque allure. The characters we see in the scripted fiction that comprises most TV programs appear in a certain light by design. We might like or dislike a given actor, but we can’t assign him responsibility for what he does and says; writers do that. By contrast, when a Real World “cast member” does or says something, that’s really him.

And the things the Real World-ers will do and say, on camera, when they have contracted to commit their every waking moment to videotape and have every belch, fit of pique, and bad-hair moment broadcast endlessly by MTV and dissected tirelessly (and usually unfavorably) by the viewers, never cease to boggle my mind. In other words, they know they have an electronic witness to their acting like idiots, and yet they continue to act like idiots anyway. Of course, if they didn’t act like idiots, Bunim-Murray wouldn’t have much of a show, but the vast majority of the cast members exhibit a fundamental lack of self-control that I’m at a loss to explain.

I should probably insert a disclaimer at this point, namely that I’d certainly never get picked for a season of RW, because I’m not gay, I’m not ethnic, I don’t have super-conservative parents whom I could horrify by getting a piercing, I’ve already lost my virginity so I can’t sit around in the confessional moaning about how difficult that pesky hymen has made my life, I don’t have a co-dependent significant other to scream epithets at me so loudly that the phone shorts out, I don’t have access to any little kids and thus can’t give them sips of alcohol, I don’t have a Kooky Kartooning Kareer whose continuing flaccidity the cameras can document, I don’t rap, I don’t like to cry in front of other people, I don’t leave food out for three days, I don’t add sugar to Kool-Aid or pick up streetwalkers and bring them back to a communal house or want to get into Formula One racing or practice pathological nudity. Also, at the decrepit age of twenty-seven, I’m now considered too “old” to appear on the show, because the producers assume that the average twenty-seven-year-old has grown out of the black-and-white-worldview posturing and unnecessary territorial marking that hallmarks most RW episodes. The average twenty-seven-year-old has a job and a pre-existing life, finds the customary petty squabbling over perceived slights merely annoying instead of all-consuming, and will roll her eyes and leave the house for a pint rather than go toe-to-toe with the offender, so unless they wanted a bunch of messages on their bulletin boards saying “what’s with the tall snotty chick who keeps muttering ‘help me, Sam Adams, you’re my only hope’ and stalking out of the house” and “how come we only see the back of Sarah’s head once every two weeks,” I don’t think they’d bother with me.

And that’s what it comes down to, because I don’t consider myself a particularly mature twenty-seven-year-old, but I remember myself at nineteen . . . or twenty-one . . . or twenty-three . . . and it’s not pretty. Granted, I didn’t choose to inflict my gory maturation process on a nation of cable subscribers, preferring instead to torment a close circle of family and friends with my solipsism, puerility, drunken acts of spinelessness, and inexplicable sense of entitlement. But a lot of the time, when I find myself writhing in agony on the couch at the latest show of Real World-er jerkassity, it’s because I recognize something about one of my younger selves there that makes me cringe. Take Real World‘s Hawaii season as an example. I find it impossible to understand how Ruthie would get so drunk that she needed her stomach pumped in the very first episode of the run, then continue to get dangerously drunk in the days that followed, and then get behind the wheel of a car after downing several large glasses of what looked like Long Island iced tea . . . but then, sort of like Will Rogers, I’ve seldom met a beer I didn’t like, and as a woman who once broke into university lecture hall for the purposes of having inebriated sex, I don’t know that I can pass judgment on Ruthie. Or on anyone else who has ever gotten drunk. Or on anyone else, period. But I will note for the record that, if I had had cameras following me, I probably would have taken a Pasadena on the whole thing. I also have trouble understanding how Amaya didn’t know how weak-willed and co-dependent she appeared. I’ve chased more than a few not-that-interested men in my life, but I knew at the time that I needed to get a life and I tried not to make my machinations too obvious, and I can’t imagine draping myself all over a nineteen-year-old hardbody who had no intention of – well, all right, I can more than “imagine” doing it, I can remember doing it with flinch-inducing clarity. But I did it off-camera. I’ve dorked out plenty, I admit, but I’ve done most of the dorking out off-camera (I will reserve commentary on my part in the criminal enterprise known as “the public-access show” for another column). Mistakes were made, but at least only a few people saw them.

I could go on in this vein for ages: Beth’s mouthy, unconsidered “feminism,” which consisted largely of the belief that, since most men found her odious (and rightly so), then all men must therefore suck a priori; Judd’s flabby humor, which managed to seem self-deprecating while actually revealing how well he thought of himself (and wrongly so), not to mention his overweening self-righteousness and his relentless working of the sensitive-guy angle to impress the ladies (see also: Matt from the Hawaii season, but with a stalker twist); Sarah’s “bluntness = the greatest good” credo; Kameelah’s melodramatic verdict-finding when nobody asked her; the tattoo reading “I Am A Wild Girl, Look At Me – Look, World! Look!” that Lindsay should just go ahead and have inked onto her forehead already; Kaia’s obtuse pretentiousness and hypocrisy. Certain cast members took the annoying behavior to more egregiously puerile extremes than others (Stephen much?), but really, they all just act – young. As time goes on and I get older myself, I find the antics of these kids – and they’re kids, most of them, at least emotionally – increasingly tiresome, and although I don’t plan to miss the premiere of the ninth season, I don’t know how much longer I can stomach it. I’ve got nothing against the eighteen-to-twenty-four demo, but a lot of people that age tend to think that they know everything, that the world should make room for them at the table just because they showed up, that staying true to themselves – selves on which the crusts haven’t yet cooled – takes precedence over playing well with others. I used to think the same things, but I grew out of it.

Bunim-Murray doesn’t want adults on Real World, because most adults will make more of an effort to resolve interpersonal problems rationally, and because adults have to make rent, and smile through dinners with the in-laws, and do a bunch of other non-TV-worthy, “boring,” go-along-to-get-along-type things that younger adults don’t necessarily have any concept of yet. And that’s as it should be. My life would make awful television. Sarah sits at her desk; Sarah gets a snack; Sarah does a bit of yoga; Sarah talks on the phone; Sarah tries to keep the cats from killing each other; Sarah sits at her desk some more; lather, rinse, repeat. But Sarah has probably watched her last Real World marathon too, because Sarah works fifteen hours a day, and she absolutely must find a better way to spend her anorexic amount of free time, like visiting a museum or making jewelry or learning a new language or volunteering, something that will resuscitate her brain cells, something more worthwhile than watching a group of overprivileged kids re-enact her college years and remind her of the snitty little brat she used to be.

That, and stop referring to herself in the third person.

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