Grid Effect

We’ll get to the links a little later, but I have to dedicate a few words to what I saw last night on The Real World: Cancun premiere, because it’s remarkable how little this show has changed. If you were in your 70’s or under 15 and have never seen the series before, it might have been life-altering. Otherwise it was just more youth-filler for the once proud cable network. Not that it was particularly offensive or that the people this year were any less impressive than those that came before; in fact the lot of them seemed genuinely excited to be there, which is more than I can say for the Hollywood season. God, what a wretched group of people they were.

But it was just (how can I explain this eloquently)…dull. There are four men and four women, following the theme from the Brooklyn season with an even gender head count. All the men are sporting moderate muscle definition to accompany their dullard personalities, and all the women are impossibly attractive and completely and utterly vapid. Basically, it’s like every other Real World season of the past ten years or so (with the exception of Brooklyn, and that was such a ham-fisted effort that it was just as uninteresting).

You can probably guess what happened so I’m just going to give you the short-handed version of it: the cast-mates met each other, got confirmation on everyone’s sexual orientation, marveled at their new surroundings, showed off their pierced ring fingers, got drunk, vomited, passed out, one roommate banged some random girl at a club (because she has tattoos!) and another made out with her mom, a guy dumped his girlfriend and got his hair braided. In even shorter-hand, it was basically the exact same Real World premiere that you would have seen for the past twelve seasons or so. The end.

We will say this: this season’s cast could have had such a positive reaction because it was impossible to feign casualness. This is, by far and away, the best setting for any reality show, much less a Real World season. I mean, if you were given the option to live in a high rise hotel suite with an ocean front view in Cancun, or a broken down, mice infested loft in Brooklyn, which are you going to opt for? Outside of some die hard Brooklynites or New Yorkers, I have to imagine this vote is pretty monolithic.

We probably won’t watch another episode, because it’s going to be repetitive as all hell, but it was nice to know what direction they’re planning on taking the series after the attempt to cast “real people” for the 21st season. With any luck, MTV will realize just how much cheaper the production costs are for some random dating show and cease bastardizing this once respectable franchise.

Links much later today.

UPDATE: Fuck the links, we’re going to do a running diary of the NBA Draft tonight. We’ll be back around 7:30-ish EST. This might sound atypical, and it is. But it isn’t unprecedented.