The Real World - New York

First off, I want to apologize for not recapping this most recent season of The Real World. Here's a quick recap of the season:

Mike is very conservative in his beliefs. Leroy likes sex a lot. Dustin falls in love easily. Heather is the resident cute girl. Naomi is really confident and lives in the bronx. Nany is 21 and has had the same boyfriend for six years. Adam claims to have "no game" when it comes to girls, but gets Nany to break up with her boyfriend within the first few weeks. Dustin falls for Heather. Leroy and Naomi start sleeping together, but allow each other to sleep with other people. Leroy and Mike become best friends. Adam gets ridiculous when drunk and is kicked out. Nany's really sad about it. They get a new roommate, Cooke. She's pretty boring throughout the show. The roommates find out that Dustin used to do gay porn. Heather's really upset, so they break up, only to get back together a few days later. When broken up Dustin drunkenly kisses Cooke and all the girls are pissed at her. Adam visits Las Vegas and Nany decides she doesn't like him anymore. In the last episode Mike and Naomi have a fake wedding for fun. It was better than New Orleans, but not quite as good as DC.

The AV Club started recapping the FIRST season of The Real World, which aired in 1992. I was only a baby! I decided to also start watching the season on youtube. I have watched the first two episodes so far. And so far I really like it. It is just as stupid as every season I've seen has been. (I started watching casually in season 19, Sydney. I began watching regularly in season 22, Cancun. So far, my favorite season has been DC, which is apparently a lot of people's least favorite season because it was too serious.) The main character in the first season seems to be Julie, who is 19 years old, the youngest of seven kids and the youngest of the seven roommates. She grew up very sheltered, but is very open-minded. She becomes fast friends with Eric by the second episode. Eric is a model. In the second episode he is on a tv show talking about sexuality in television commercials. He is in a commercial in which he and a woman rip each other's clothes off down to their underwear to symbolize some big sale or something. I don't know. The ad was confusing. Surprisingly, Julie believes it is ok to wear only underwear on the television. Julie also becomes good friends with Heather, who is a rapper. And she's black, which Julie's dad doesn't like very much. Kevin is also black. One night in the first episode Julie and Kevin talk about prejudice. The conversation doesn't really go anywhere, nor does it accomplish anything. Other cast members include Norman, who is pretty obviously the first token gay roommate. It hasn't been said outright yet, but you can tell, also it's on wikipedia. And rounding out the cast is Andre, who obviously likes grunge so much. How do I know? Because it's the early 90's and he has really long hair and doesn't seem to care. Oh, I almost forgot about Becky. There's also this girl named Becky, who is a folk singer. In the first episode she has a gig and all the roommates come to watch. Norman than discusses it in his bathtub in his talking head interview. It was very strange. In the second episode Becky seems to catch on to the attraction between Julie and Eric. She is never seen during the "action sequences," but recollects everything that happened. She tells a story of how she asked Eric if it would be ok to bring a date for Julie to this party. Apparently Eric looked like he was going to shoot fire out of his eyes. He did not want to have Becky bring Julie a date. But Julie is just so sweet and innocent it doesn't seem that she understands what Eric really thinks of her. She probably just thinks they're friends.
It's really interesting to watch this so close to the end of the most recent season. (Season 25 ended last Wednesday.) It doesn't seem like MTV had enough crew to catch everything, as Becky only told the camera what happened to her during the second episode and Andre, Norman and Kevin were briefly, if at all, in the second episode. They've certainly got the show down to a science. I really like this season so far because one, it's interesting to see how unchanged the show is, and it's interesting to see how changed the world is. For example, when they don't have anything to do they simply sit around and talk about eating habits. However, a major part of episode 2, as mentioned before, was sexuality in advertising. In 1992, it was a big deal, but in 2011, this is the norm. Saying the show is entirely unchanged isn't completely true. The basic idea of show is still the same, throw seven (or eight) people in a house/loft/mansion/casino and see how they interact. In the first few seasons they were not given an assignment, since the fifth season, with a few exceptions, they had a job they had to attend to. I would say that the people have become more attractive since the first season, but I'm sure the people on the show were good looking for 1992, but none of them look like the girls in the most recent seasons.