When The Real World premiered on MTV in 1992, it promised viewers a rare opportunity to see American youth grapple with questions of racial, gendered, and sexual identity and difference that contemporary adults were also struggling to articulate. As some of the first reality TV participants, The Real World’s young, Gen X cast was unaware that their alternately immature and volatile conversations about hot-button social issues would become iconic, endlessly replayed, and revisited for decades, first on MTV, and later, on the internet. However, the 2021/22 Homecoming seasons of The Real World, airing on Paramount+, brought the original casts of Season 1 (New York) and Season 2 (Los Angeles) back together, this time as middle-aged adults. Homecoming provided a platform for Gen X to “re-do” these important debates from the past and reckon with their own youthful misunderstandings of identity politics. Although Gen X remains an absent presence in today’s generational discourses so focused on the tensions between Boomers and Millennials and Zoomers, The Real World Homecoming asks what happens when Gen Xers re-enter the reality TV spotlight for an opportunity to reboot the past.
Amanda Ann Klein is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at East Carolina University. She is the author of American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, & Defining Subcultures (University of Texas Press, 2011), Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV’s Transition to Reality Programming (Duke University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Multiplicities: Cycles, Sequels, Remakes and Reboots in Film & Television (University of Texas Press, 2016). Her scholarship has also appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Jump Cut, Film Criticism, Flow, Antenna, Salon, The Atlantic, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and The New Yorker.
Presented by Getting Real: The Cultural Politics of Reality TV, a working group project sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, the Department of English Language and Literatures, the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture.
Registration is required to attend via the Zoom link below. Please contact tbrazas@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.
Date: April 13, 2022
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Date: April 13, 2022
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM