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      Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Tries Reality TV to Find ‘the Next Great Artist’

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      Seven artists compete for an exhibition at the museum in a series it produced with MTV and the Smithsonian Channel.“One of you will show your work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and will take home $100,000.”At least that’s the promise made by Dometi Pongo, the host of a new reality television series, “The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist,” about the making of an art star. The first season is six episodes, produced by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn together with MTV and the Smithsonian Channel.The program, which starts March 3, focuses on seven rising artists from around the country who were selected by Hirshhorn curators. Each week, the artists are commissioned to make a themed work — such as an exploration of gender — that is evaluated by Melissa Chiu, the Hirshhorn’s director, and a team of guest judges (the artists Adam Pendleton, Kenny Schachter and Abigail DeVille are among them).“This TV partnership was really about an expansive idea of art — radical accessibility,” Chiu said in a telephone interview, adding that the show will be “bringing new light to artists and artwork.”The show’s host, Dometi Pongo, left, with three of its judges: Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn; Kenny Schachter, an artist and writer; and Keith Rivers, a Hirshhorn trustee and collector.via Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Photo by Shannon FinneyThe artist Jennifer Warren inside Barbara Kruger’s “Belief + Doubt” (2012) at the Hirshhorn Museum during filming.via Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Photo by Shannon FinneyWhether audiences find the making of art compelling television remains to be seen. Chiu said she hopes the show will help “demystify what it means to be an artist.”The artists are Jamaal Barber, Misha Kahn, Frank Buffalo Hyde, Baseera Khan, Clare Kambhu, Jillian Mayer and Jennifer Warren.The weekly series will feature artwork from the museum’s collection, including pieces by Harold Ancart and Jacqueline Humphries and an exhibit by Barbara Kruger. Chiu said the program was part of the museum’s mission to serve as “the national museum of modern art” and builds on its recent initiatives, including the revitalization of its Sculpture Garden with a design by Hiroshi Sugimoto that connects to the National Mall.Recently, the museum also appointed the Colombian pop star J Balvin as a global cultural ambassador to work with teens in its Artlab education center. And the museum recently created the Hirshhorn Eye (Hi), which allows visitors to point their phones at a work of art and see a video of the artist talking about it.Having the TV series broadcast on both MTV and the Smithsonian Channel (there are no plans to stream it) will allow the Hirshhorn to reach both “a younger demographic as well as a more mature demographic,” Chiu said, adding that she hoped the program would reveal more about “what the museum does, but also the artistic process.” More

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      A Gay Icon From Reality TV’s Early Years Makes a Hesitant Return

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      Danny Roberts, a star of “The Real World” on MTV, brought a sense of possibility to the pop culture landscape during a fraught time for gay representation.GRAFTON, Vt. — When you cross into Vermont from New York, the road opens up and the Green Mountains emerge. Make it to Grafton (population: 645), and your cell service largely evaporates. This was where, on a recent day, Danny Roberts was standing in the doorway of the tiny cabin in the woods where he lives with his 6-year-old daughter. His eyes are crinkly now; his sandy hair seems uncertain of its next move. He has grown out a beard.His daughter was out for the day, Mr. Roberts said. His mother, who was visiting for the week, was watching her.“It’s kind of the elephant in the room with my family,” he said. “We don’t talk about the reality TV thing.”When he first put himself out there, in the ninth season of “The Real World,” he was young and a bit naïve. Now, at 44, he’s doing it again, for reasons he can only half-explain.The phrase “reality TV” was just becoming part of the everyday lexicon when he found himself jammed into a house in New Orleans with six other young people who — with the help of a few narrative contrivances — were taking their first stumbles into adulthood.When he and his fellow players left “The Real World” for the real world, the stumbling continued, and Mr. Roberts learned that the TV version of himself had become a shadow that traveled with him. Danny Roberts meant something to people.Mr. Roberts, left, and the cast of “The Real World: New Orleans” at the People’s Choice Awards in 2001.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImageIf you’re not a member of the microgeneration able to bust out the chorus to the Spice Girls hit “Wannabe” from memory, there’s a good chance you have no idea who Mr. Roberts is. But for a swath of gay elder millennials whose formative years unfolded to an MTV soundtrack, his reappearance as a cast member on a streaming return to “The Real World” on Paramount+ is likely to spark that old zig-a-zig-ah.In 2000, Mr. Roberts was something new in pop culture: a gay sex symbol zapped into the basement rec rooms of teenagers who had never encountered such a creature. Gay people, at the time, were becoming more visible on TV — thanks, in large part, to earlier installments of “The Real World” — but none had the wholesomeness and confident sexuality that Mr. Roberts, then 22, exuded with every flash of his Mona Lisa-meets-Backstreet Boy smile.The project of L.G.B.T.Q. visibility was going through an awkward phase in that time. Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out in 1997 created a sense that things were changing. But her sitcom, “Ellen,” was canceled one season after her revelation.“Will & Grace,” another sitcom, broke some ground by chronicling the relationship between a gay man and his straight friend, but discerning viewers couldn’t help but notice that it had about as much bite as “I Love Lucy.” In 2000, “Survivor,” then in its first season, delivered an openly gay (and, often, openly nude) antihero in Richard Hatch, who schemed his way to million-dollar victory. But he was a rather dark, Machiavellian figure.“The Real World” had featured L.G.B.T.Q. people since its 1992 debut — most notably Pedro Zamora, a young activist from the third season, who died of AIDS-related illness a day after the finale — but Mr. Zamora’s impact was complicated by deep sadness.Mr. Roberts, born and raised in small-town Rockmart, Ga., was something different from his TV predecessors. Rather than playing a jester, villain or de-eroticized Ken doll, he was chill, joyful in his identity, and he seemed to glow with an unapologetic sex appeal.“It’s kind of the elephant in the room with my family,” Mr. Roberts said. “We don’t talk about the reality TV thing.”Adrianna Newell for The New York TimesYes, he was sex on a stick (with a soul patch). And for gay adolescents in a time before social media, who relied on television for glimpses of fellow travelers, the sight of him bopping around the “Real World” digs in his black boxer briefs was both an awakening and an indication of new possibilities.Unlike Mr. Zamora, Mr. Roberts was, at the outset, not particularly motivated by activism. His boyfriend during the filming of “The Real World: New Orleans,” an Army officer named Paul Dill, appeared on the show using only his first name, and his face was hidden to conceal his identity. These were the days of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Bill Clinton-era policy that allowed L.G.B.T.Q. people to serve in the military under the condition that they stayed in the closet, and Mr. Dill could have lost his job if he had been revealed.The couple took the risk of going before MTV’s cameras not in protest of the policy, but because they couldn’t bear to be apart. Mr. Dill’s blurred-out face in his several appearances became an enduring symbol of the injustice of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” as well as the liminal space gay people occupied.“I really didn’t know what ‘Don’t Ask, don’t tell’ was,” Mr. Roberts said. “I didn’t know the ramifications. We really should have at least changed his name.”The decision would have consequences. After baring himself to the cameras, Mr. Roberts returned to everyday life only to be forced back into a new kind of closet as he tried to continue the relationship.“Every day, we lived with fear,” he recalled. “Of his career being destroyed. Of being dishonorably discharged. And I had my own fear. He was stationed in North Carolina, so we’re in the South, and every kid out there knew who I was.”“You know, Matthew Shepard was just a couple of years before this,” he continued, referring to the gay college student who was kidnapped and murdered in Wyoming in 1998. “You keep repeating in your head: I’m going to get gay-bashed in the parking lot just trying to get my groceries.”Mr. Roberts, right, with fellow cast members on a recent episode of “The Real World Homecoming: New Orleans.”Paramount+After breaking up with Mr. Dill in 2006, Mr. Roberts settled into a life that seemed to mirror the increasing ordinariness of gay men in America. He became a recruiter in the tech industry. He married, adopted his daughter and divorced. (“I don’t recommend marriage,” he said.) In 2018, he announced that he had been living with H.I.V. since 2011. He moved to Vermont.Then, like an old flame, “The Real World” came calling. Mr. Roberts said he found it difficult to resist the paycheck and the chance at closure. “It was a nostalgia thing,” he said. “It’s returning to the scene of the crime.”This time around, he’s more mindful of the way his presence on TV can create change. “For me, personally, all the progress that L.G.B.T.Q. people have made in the last 20 feels very tenuous now,” he said. “This is a chance to remind people about what things were like then, and that we don’t want to go back there.”The new show, “The Real World Homecoming: New Orleans,” doesn’t entirely abandon the reality TV conventions it helped pioneer. In one episode, a drunk cast member tumbles out of an S.U.V. and face-plants on the sidewalk.But as the seven old housemates return to their New Orleans haunts, they carry with them the baggage of middle age. Mr. Dill makes an appearance in a poignant scene on the show’s third episode, coming face to face with Mr. Roberts for the first time since 2006. His face is now fully visible.After making his name in reality TV, Mr. Roberts worked as a recruiter and moved to a small town in Vermont.Adrianna Newell for The New York TimesAs Mr. Roberts strolled the grounds of his rural property on a gray spring day, the easy charisma of his younger self was in evidence. Since 2020, he has been seeing a farmer who lives one town over. (They met on the dating app Scruff.) “He had no clue I’d been on TV,” he said. “I don’t think he grew up with cable.”This time around, there’s nothing to hide. But some habits die hard: Mr. Roberts declined to share the farmer’s name.And while he has mixed feelings about the path that “The Real World” led him down, the experience was as important to him as it was to his fans all those years ago.“I think a lot of people who are marginal, especially who are gay, especially from that time, you felt invisible,” he said. “It’s this deep hole of emptiness. Doing that show was the most exciting, beautiful part of my life at that point. I got my first taste of what confirmation feels like.” More

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      The Moment That Janet Jackson’s Career Stalled and Justin Timberlake’s Soared

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      Jackson was vilified after her 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, while Timberlake’s popularity seemed to take off. Our new documentary examines how the superstars were treated after their unforgettable wardrobe malfunction.Reuters//Gary Hershorn (United States Entertainment)‘Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson’Producer/Director Jodi GomesReporter/Senior Producer Rachel AbramsReporter Alan LightWatch our new documentary on Friday, Nov. 19, at 10 p.m. on FX and streaming on Hulu.The term “wardrobe malfunction” has been part of our vocabulary ever since Janet Jackson’s right breast made a surprise appearance at the end of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.When Justin Timberlake tore off part of Jackson’s bustier in front of 70,000 people in Houston’s Reliant Stadium, over 140 million people watching on TV gasped — if they noticed.It happened so quickly (the moment lasted nine-sixteenths of one second) that even some of the halftime show’s producers missed it until their phones, and phones all over America, started ringing.“Did you see what just happened?” Jim Steeg, the National Football League’s director of special events, asked Salli Frattini, the MTV executive in charge of the halftime show. She had to rewind the tape to be sure.“We looked at the close-up shot. We looked at the wide shot, and we all stood there in shock,” Frattini recalled in a new documentary by The New York Times.Was it an accident? Was it planned? Was it a stunt?The ensuing uproar — from the N.F.L., from the Federal Communications Commission, from politicians and their allies — was the peak of a national debate at the time over what’s acceptable on America’s airwaves, and who gets to decide.In our documentary, premiering Friday at 10 p.m. Eastern time on FX and Hulu, we hear from the former commissioner of the N.F.L., Paul Tagliabue, and the MTV executives who were in charge of producing the halftime show. And we talk to some of the politicians who seized on the moment to try to rein in content that they deemed inappropriate.We also look back at Jackson’s long career, which never seemed to recover, while Timberlake’s soared. And we consider how issues of race and sexism mixed to consume one superstar’s legacy and propel another’s career to the next level.Supervising Producer Liz DayProducers Fred Charleston, Jr., Anthony McLemore, Timothy MoranCo-Producer Melanie BencosmeDirector of Photography Asad FaruqiVideo Editor Geoff O’Brien“The New York Times Presents” is a series of documentaries representing the unparalleled journalism and insight of The New York Times, bringing viewers close to the essential stories of our time. More

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      in Movies

      Tawny Kitaen, Star of 1980s Music Videos, Dies at 59

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      Ms. Kitaen gained fame for her carefree spirit and sultry dancing in music videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt and her role in the movie “Bachelor Party.”Tawny Kitaen, an actress who gained fame in the 1980s for her roles in rock music videos and who starred with Tom Hanks in the movie “Bachelor Party,” died on Friday at her home in Newport Beach, Calif. She was 59.Ms. Kitaen’s death was confirmed by a daughter, Wynter Finley, who said the cause was not known.Ms. Kitaen became a mainstay on MTV in the 1980s when the network was at its peak cultural influence with music videos playing all day.With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the Whitesnake music video “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”Julie Kitaen was born on Aug. 5, 1961, in San Diego. She studied ballet and gymnastics until she was 15. After appearing in a Jack LaLanne commercial, and in television shows and movies, she gained wider exposure as Mr. Hanks’s fiancée in the 1984 comedy “Bachelor Party.”But it was her appearance in music videos that solidified her image in Generation X’s imagination as a free-spirited beauty having the time of her life.She once described working with Paula Abdul on the set of one video.Ms. Abdul, then a choreographer, asked her what she could do. Ms. Kitaen said she showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” She then left, Ms. Kitaen said.“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”She married the Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale in 1989 and the couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a major-league baseball pitcher. They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.Later, Ms. Kitaen appeared on reality shows and spoke openly about her struggles with addiction to cocaine and painkillers.In a 2010 interview with The Daily Pilot, she described her volunteer work at a shelter for women who had left abusive relationships and said she herself was a survivor of domestic violence. Ms. Kitaen said that after her divorce from Mr. Finley, she became involved with a man who was physically and verbally abusive.“You don’t want to tell anybody because you feel like a complete fool for staying — you protect them,” she said. “You do everything you can so other people don’t find out that he’s abusing you.”Michael Goldberg, Ms. Kitaen’s agent, said in recent years she appeared on various podcasts and radio shows and relished talking about her time as a figure in rock history.“People still love to hear those stories because the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle is something we all fantasize about, isn’t it?” he said. “And she lived it. And had so much to say about it.”Ms. Kitaen is survived by her two daughters and a brother and a sister. More

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      in Television

      ‘Kid 90’ and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy

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      A documentary from Soleil Moon Frye, star of “Punky Brewster,” and a reunion of “The Real World” remind us that Gen X didn’t curate themselves for mass consumption.Sometimes I remember the clunky devices of my youth — the boxy Polaroid cameras, the bricklike car phones, the shrill answering machines, the pagers that could be made to spell an angular, all-caps “BOOBS.” This was the personal tech of the early-to-mid-1990s, in the years before AOL Instant Messenger provided an internet on-ramp, which means it was pretty much the last time an American teenager could behave with some expectation of privacy.Still, camcorders existed back then and Soleil Moon Frye, the child star of “Punky Brewster,” rarely turned hers off. In “Kid 90,” a documentary now streaming on Hulu, an adult, manicured Moon Frye — filmed in the kind of all-white room usually associated with near-death experiences — revisits her endless home movies, as well as related ephemera: diaries, voice mail messages and photographs. If you are a young Gen Xer or an old millennial, “Kid 90” may provide the uncanny and not entirely welcome experience of having your childhood returned to you — the syntax, the celebrities, the fashions that haven’t come back around (the backward baseball cap, the vest as a bustier). Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.In the 1980s sitcom “Punky Brewster,” Moon Frye starred as a girl being raised by a foster father.Gene Arias/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty ImagesBefore I clicked play, I asked an editor how many drinks I might need to make it through the documentary. “A 40 of Mickey’s malt liquor,” she wrote.The early ’90s also reappear on “The Real World Homecoming: New York,” a Paramount + show that reunites the cast members from the first season of MTV’s flagship unscripted series. Seven people, strangers no more, return to the New York loft (well, one is waylaid by a positive Covid-19 test) where their teen and 20-something lives were taped for a few months in 1992. It wasn’t the first reality show, but its wild popularity and subsequent franchise profoundly influenced what came after. “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”To watch the series and the documentary is to dilate, helplessly, on what has changed (or not) in the past 30 or so years. It’s to realize that Moon Frye, by cheerfully surveilling her own life, and those first Real Worlders, by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.“The Real World Homecoming: New York” reunited the cast of the hit reality show, which premiered on MTV in 1992; from left, Norman Korpi, Kevin Powell, Julie Gentry and Heather B. Gardner, with Andre Comeau looking on.Danielle Levitt/MTVMoon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more. These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell. Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.“Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings. A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance — trying on different outfits and identities — and seeing if they feel OK. (The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another.)I was a teenager in the ’90s, and I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,” and a grunge-adjacent look that my high school bestie still calls the Lumberjack Sexpot — persist only on the bloopers reel in my head. Until young adults achieve some reasonable sense of self (and style), why get the internet involved?When Moon Frye moved to New York, she fell in with a group of skaters, some of whom were in the movie “Kids.”Soleil Moon Frye/HuluThe kids in “Kid 90” are filmed during their off hours: poolside, at house parties, high on mushrooms in a field somewhere. They sometimes perform for the camera — winking, pontificating, flashing a don’t-tell-mom pack of cigarettes — but they perform confident that almost no one will ever see it. “We never thought, ‘Oh, well, she’s going to use that in a way that’s going to come back and haunt us,’” Gosselaar says in the documentary.Back in 1992, those “Real World” participants knew that MTV would eventually air the footage, but not how that footage would be organized. They didn’t know that the producers would fabricate a will-they-or-won’t-they story line for Julie Gentry and Eric Nies, or that Kevin Powell would be edited to seem like a “politically angry Black man,” as he said in a recent interview. “We all thought it was a documentary about seven artists,” Rebecca Blasband says in “Homecoming.” If she and her loftmates didn’t act entirely naturally, they don’t seem to have spent the series trying to build a marketable brand.The producers and editors did the building for them, giving each a type (naïf, himbo, rock god, firebrand), which the cast members then spent years trying to live up to — or live down. “I had this notoriety, but I had no idea how to utilize it,” Gentry says in “Homecoming.”Moon Frye as a teenager; she is now appearing in a “Punky Brewster” reboot on Peacock.Soleil Moon Frye/HuluMoon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s. In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles. Peers called her Punky Boobster.“It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,” a teenage Moon Frye says. “I just want people to see me for the person I am inside.” Here’s a thought: What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery. But the serious roles never came. After years in the entertainment wilderness, she is now starring in a “Punky Brewster” reboot, now streaming on Peacock. “Kid 90” presents this comeback as a chirpy capstone, but it feels darker. The documentary honors a slew of friends who didn’t make it to their 40s (including Jonathan Brandis and Justin Pierce, a star of the movie “Kids”) and mentions the addictions suffered by those who did. Some of that pain must have originated in the space between what the industry (and the fans) told these actors they had to be and who they felt they were. Maybe Moon Frye is Punky once more because “the business” wouldn’t let her be anyone else.I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch. I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on. There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one. But I did stupid things for love. What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me. But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in. More

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      The Original ‘Real World’ Cast Reunites, Older but Still Not Polite

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      A new Paramount+ series reunites the first cast of the pioneering reality show in the same loft they shared nearly 30 years ago.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe Original ‘Real World’ Cast Reunites, Older but Still Not Polite“The Real World Homecoming: New York” brings back the housemates from the inaugural season of the MTV series that set the standards of reality television, for better and for worse.A new Paramount+ series reunites the first cast of the pioneering reality show in the same loft they shared nearly 30 years ago.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 26, 2021Updated 3:04 p.m. ETLate last year, Julie Gentry was in Atlanta helping her 19-year-old son, Noah, move into a house where he and four of his college classmates planned to live together while the pandemic kept them off-campus.At one point, Gentry said her son took the opportunity to tease her about the long-ago role she played in television history. “He was laughing that I was setting him up for his ‘Real World’ experience,” she said.It was only minutes later that Gentry got a text message from Bunim/Murray Productions, the company that created “The Real World” for MTV and which cast her in the debut season of that groundbreaking series. The company was inviting her to return to the same SoHo loft where she’d lived with six other aspiring artists and performers nearly 30 years ago while a camera crew recorded them for a first-of-its-kind, nonfiction soap opera.“I said that text is fake,” Gentry recalled. But as she and her former TV roommates — who have stayed in constant contact since “The Real World” premiered in May 1992 — started checking in with each other, they discovered they had all had received similar, authentic invitations. And so they all agreed to accept them.The result is “The Real World Homecoming: New York,” a new reality series that reconvenes those original seven strangers, picked once again to live in a loft and have their lives taped — not as wide-eyed teenagers and 20-somethings eager to bare their immature souls, but as parents and professionals in their 40s and 50s, with families, careers and a fuller understanding of what they exchanged decades ago for a modest amount of visibility.“Homecoming,” which begins March 4 on the new Paramount+ streaming service, allows viewers to catch up with its fully-grown alums, who take a certain pride in having made “The Real World” before the genre it helped create became ubiquitous, codified and mercenary.The 1992 cast didn’t realize they were creating a new TV genre. Clockwise from top left, Kevin Powell, Eric Nies, Andre Comeau, Heather B. Gardner, Julie Gentry, Norman Korpi and Becky Blasband.Credit…Chris CarrollHaving lived for so long in a world that “The Real World” helped to create, we can sometimes forget what an offbeat proposition it was when it was introduced and how different the media environment was that awaited it.Before the show arrived, MTV filled its airtime with low-rent coverage of youth culture and narrowly tailored blocks of music videos; the network had homegrown franchises like “Headbangers Ball,” “Club MTV” and “Yo! MTV Raps” and it played “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in constant rotation while other signature programs like “Beavis and Butt-Head” were still on the horizon.“The Real World,” created by the producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray, took its cues from the 1970s PBS documentary series “An American Family” and from scripted teen dramas of the day like “Beverly Hills, 90210.” It was part gamble and part stunt, not an attempt to spawn a generation’s worth of programming on MTV (in spinoffs and clones like “Road Rules,” “The Osbournes” and “Jersey Shore”) and across television.But the DNA of “The Real World” lives on to this day — in highly mutated form, in some cases — in reality franchises like “Big Brother,” “Real Housewives,” “The Bachelor,” “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and countless other shows that exist to mine content from social conflict.For its original cast members, “The Real World” promised the chance to live rent-free in New York while they pursued their careers, but it bonded and branded them in ways they never expected.“No matter what, we’re connected for life by this,” said Kevin Powell, who has remained a journalist, author and activist. “No one can say they were the first — we are the first.”“Homecoming” offers its cast members the chance to look back on their misadventures and conflicts from the original show and reassess themselves for better or worse. As Gentry, an aspiring dancer from Birmingham, Ala., who became a mother of two and a community garden organizer, put it, “We’ve evolved but we haven’t really changed.”They are also hopeful that by revisiting their past debates on what were once taboo subjects for TV — sometimes heated arguments on race, sexuality and privilege in America — they can do better for themselves and set a healthier example for viewers.“Hopefully we’ve reached this level where the slings and arrows and heatedness can mature into a rational conversation and a real discourse,” said Rebecca Blasband, a singer-songwriter and recording artist who went by Becky on the original series.She continued, “Because that’s what we need in this country. We’ve become a combative society, and in that combat, we lose reason.”Norman Korpi was working as a photographer and fashion designer when he learned about “The Real World” from producers who were scouting his loft as a possible location for the series. The show appealed to him because of its intended focus on young people trying to break into creative careers and its potential to democratize TV programming.Set in the same SoHo loft, “Homecoming” offers its cast members the chance to look back on their past misadventures and reassess themselves.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York Times“It allowed you to see people who had never been shown before, to be exposed to people you’d never encountered and see their stories evolve,” he said.The show’s Black cast members felt their decision to appear on “The Real World” was especially fraught, requiring them to weigh the value of representing the communities they came from against the credibility it would cost them there.Heather B. Gardner, then an up-and-coming rapper, said she felt it was important to appear on MTV at a time when the network featured few Black people and hip-hop was widely portrayed as crude and inherently violent.But Gardner, now a Sirius XM radio host, said that many peers were skeptical of her motives at the time.“My record company didn’t understand it,” she said. “And the hip-hop world didn’t initially embrace it. It took a lot of work to earn their stamp, of me being like, ‘Yo, this was just a documentary — I didn’t quote-unquote sell out.’”The housemates attended political rallies, met NBA stars and enjoyed some good-natured hedonism on MTV’s dime.“My daughter will say things to me like, ‘What were you thinking, taking your top off in Jamaica?,’” Gentry said. “I tell her, ‘I had no idea you were ever going to exist, so I couldn’t really think about it.’”They also quickly found out what happened when people stop getting polite and found themselves in heated disagreements about their different backgrounds. In the show’s first episode, Gentry saw that Gardner carried a beeper and jokingly asked her if she sold drugs. A later episode, called “Julie Thinks Kevin Is Psycho!,” recorded an intense fight between those two roommates, where Powell declared, “Racism is everywhere,” and Gentry retorted, “Because of people like you — not people like me.”For the original cast, “The Real World” was a chance to live rent-free in New York, but it bonded them in unexpected ways.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesBut time passed and temperatures cooled. Cast members became friends outside of the show and got on group texts with each other; Gardner was even a guest at Gentry’s wedding. “The Real World” became Patient Zero in the viral spread of reality TV, running 33 seasons in its original incarnation as reality programming overtook the programming grids of MTV and countless other channels.As MTV’s parent company, ViacomCBS, prepares to relaunch its CBS All Access service as Paramount+, it sees reality TV and “The Real World Homecoming,” in particular, as a powerful lure for potential subscribers.The original “Real World” series “was the purest of the social experiments,” said Chris McCarthy, the president of MTV Entertainment Group. “People have held deep relationships with these cast members, in a way that, quite honestly, we only dream could happen today.”Noting that MTV also plans to bring a resuscitated version of “The Real World” to Paramount+, McCarthy said he expected that “Homecoming” is a series that “will bring back lapsed viewers and the next version could be something totally different for brand-new viewers.”But the thought of returning to the show in middle age is one that some cast members had to sit with. No one wanted to be seen as trying to recapture past glories: “How could we recreate something that we did at that time in our lives?” said Gardner. “Unless we stay drunk the whole time, it’s not going to work.”Nies’s participation in the new show was limited to video chats. Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe roommates were not encouraged, either, by the state of modern-day reality TV, some of which has a distasteful and selfish tone and has helped unleash unsustainable levels of narcissism.“There’s a very greedy aspect of the industry that’s like, ‘Whoever can behave the worst or have some sex tapes, go right to the front of the line,’” Korpi said.Blasband said that the reality genre was not solely to blame for America’s problems, but it reflected and amplified the national psyche, serving as “an expression of the subconscious of our society,” and could be used for good or ill.When “The Real World” first appeared, she said, “It was very refreshing for people to feel that they were actually connecting to something other than canned laughter.”But in the years since, she said, the reality genre has embraced “a tabloid mentality that began to bleed into news journalism — I see it on CNN or Fox News, a heightened, incendiary drama that doesn’t belong there.”Some of the roommates said they felt more compelled to participate after events like the Black Lives Matter protests of the spring and summer had reawakened them to the complex realities of racial disparities in America that they lacked the ability to articulate back in 1992.The cast members look back fondly on their “Real World” experiences.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesBut they lament what the reality TV genre, which the show pioneered, has become.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesAndre Comeau, now a rock musician living in Los Angeles, said that a torrent of videos that he had seen in recent years, capturing incidents of police violence against people of color, had been “so shocking to me, to see that on an everyday basis — I had no idea that it was so prevalent.”Comeau said he felt it was important to discuss these developments on-camera with his Black co-stars and to explain how his own stance had evolved since the original season.“At the time, I thought I was oppressed,” he said with a sardonic chuckle. “Being a young, longhaired white male living in a city, I would get pulled over on a regular basis. But that is nowhere near the level of institutional racism that happens every day.”The DNA of “The Real World” lives on in countless shows that exist to mine content from social conflict.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesNaturally, the roommates’ return to their downtown Manhattan lodgings came with some ready-made reality-TV drama. Eric Nies, the fashion model who parlayed his “Real World” fame into hosting roles on MTV programs like “The Grind,” said that he made it as far as a New York hotel room and was never actually able to set foot in the SoHo loft for “Homecoming.”Asked why, Nies said in a phone interview, “I’m not sure how much I can get into that right now.”Nies, who was able to communicate with the other housemates over a video monitor, elliptically added that the circumstances of his separation were “definitely not by my choice, but I accepted the outcome — more will be revealed in the future.” (MTV declined to comment on this.)Other cast members said that they found value in participating in “Homecoming.” Korpi, who is gay, said he wanted to revisit his experience of coming out publicly on the show and its impact on his life when the series ended.At the time he appeared on “The Real World,” Korpi said he had just ended a relationship with another man. “However, when the show aired, I was perceived by some cast and the public as bisexual, which was hurtful and a lot to bear,” he said.He added, “If you didn’t live in that time, you don’t know what it was like to come out when there’s nobody out, being gay,” he said. “People were terrified of that.”Korpi, who has been a filmmaker, a painter and an industrial designer and continues to work in his family’s bakery in Michigan, said that traditional paths in the entertainment industry were not necessarily open to him after his “Real World” season.“It wasn’t like any agent was going to touch a gay person with a 10-foot-pole,” he said. “I struggled a little bit — or a lot — and I realized I needed to make the work for myself.”Powell said he also had suffered for how “The Real World” had portrayed him.“I got stigmatized as a politically angry Black man, and that stuck with me for a long time,” he said. “It was very painful having to deal with that.”Though he did not regret the passionate feelings he had expressed on the original show, Powell said that he felt he owed it to himself to show that he could engage differently with his roommates on the new series.The cast members, wide-eyed teenagers and 20-somethings back in 1992, are now parents and professionals in their 40s and 50s.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York Times“At the time, was I very heated in a different kind of way about racism? Absolutely,” he said. “Am I different person now? You will see that when you watch the episodes.”Gentry, who had memorably sparred with Powell, said she also wished to make amends and do better this time around. “All the stuff on race, I said a lot of pretty naïve things in that first season,” she said.Powell said there was a lesson that the roommates and their viewers alike could take away from “Homecoming”: that it is possible to engage one another about our disparate perspectives and experiences as long as we do so respectfully.“We have to have uncomfortable conversations with people about things we don’t agree with,” he said. “But it has to be with love.”Shooting finished on “Homecoming” in January, and the cast members have spent the weeks since reflecting on what it meant to them. But though the reunion might seem likely to serve as a kind of bookend to their original “Real World” experiences, some were hesitant to describe it in such terms.“‘Closure’ insinuates that there was trauma or something,” Blasband said. “I have a lot of fondness for my roommates.”Gardner, who was initially reluctant to do the new show, said afterward, “I don’t regret it at all.” But not even a previous season spent living her life for public consumption was enough to prepare her for a second go-round — to have her old self reflected back to her at the same time that her current self was being held up for examination all over again.“Bruh, it’s different,” she said. “The mirror is gigantic. The mirror is Macy’s window at this point.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More