Asp Burger

Just something else for the "how the sausage was made" file, from the Hawaii book. In the "how they were cast" section, Colin describes the experience of an open casting call. He, his friend Trevor, and a young woman named Sol were sitting at a table with Mary-Ellis Bunim herself. Per Colin, Bunim instructed Trevor to ask Sol something that would "really embarrass" her. Trevor asked Sol something "obscene," and Sol had a good comeback to it. Bunim told the three of them they had an interesting dynamic. Someone else told them they would get a call by Sunday if they were going to be part of either Real World Hawaii or Road Rules Semester at Sea. You know the rest of the story. None of them got a call, and Sol, Trevor, and Colin became three of the four "rejects" who hosted the casting special. So, that's where the process was by 1998-99. The co-creator of the show wanted to see how a boy would go about humiliating a girl and how the girl would handle it.

A new Melissa interview in Vulture. "The show had been on for eight seasons by the time we got on, and we kind of did know what we were getting into, but the piece that I didn’t understand was the permanence of the choice. I’m now 45 years old, and I’m still Melissa from The Real World." If you're out of free articles with this site and you're wondering whether you should clear your browser just for this, I'd say it depends on how much you like Melissa. There's nothing in it she hasn't said on the Homecoming interview circuit, her social media, or the show itself, but it's a pretty good read. I love that "that lady" doesn't come up even once. https://www.vulture.com/article/real-world-homecoming-new-orleans-melissa-beck.html#comments

(George Costanza voice) "She's like a carrot!"

Wyatt's other appearance (between finding Peter in the cabin and finding Scott in the woods) was as a patient at the hospital. He needed to have some operation (tonsils?) and he was scared about it, and Peter gave him a pep talk about bravery. They really seemed all in for a while with trying to make Peter happen as a sympathetic character. It's weird having this recurring kid on once in a while to bring back memories of it, since his early appearances were largely to facilitate it. On GH kids: Yeah, I'm still finding every scene with Violet overdone and cloying. and there are So. Many. of Them. I'd never wish anything really bad on an actual kid, but a huge growth spurt (making all the talk about tea pawties too ridiculous even for Frank's GH to continue) can't come soon enough.

I don't see why Teck needs each individual holdout to give him a reason. Every time I hear that they can't get all seven people from a cast together again, I'll assume the reason is that people have moved on with their lives, they don't want to be on television again, and they specifically don't want to be vivisected in the Bunim/Murray lab again. I understand that. I'll watch a Homecoming for a season I enjoyed, but if I were a former cast member, the three seasons to date would not make Homecoming more tempting to me. Quite the opposite. Teck got off lightly in 1999 and then parlayed the experience into a career as an MTV personality and sometime actor, and maybe his point of view on fame hasn't changed much. Some of his castmates didn't have a great MTV experience, and now they have careers and families far from the entertainment world. While "low six figures" is a nice amount for a few weeks of your life, not everyone will be swayed by that. Matt, for example, is a teacher. By the accounts I've read, he's good at it and well liked by colleagues and students. I can see him thinking it's bad enough that anyone can go to YouTube and find the 1999 version of him with watery eyes saying "I sense the torture in Ruthie's soul," without risking embarrassment a second time.

"The man I married five times" was unintentional comedy gold. And it's, unfortunately, on brand for Carly. She lacks the awareness to connect the easy dots: you had to keep marrying him again and again because why? Admittedly, some of those may have been those "vow renewals" soaps do when they have no idea what else to write for a stagnant couple. Okay, I just did the research. I got six. Twice to the Sarah Brown version (one a renewal of vows), once to the Tamara Braun version (a renewal of vows), three times to the Laura Wright version (one a renewal of vows). Three official divorces. Two more times when it seems like they got divorced, because they were separated and there were lawyers and they kept talking about it, but they ultimately threw out the papers or didn't sign them or whatever.

From Melissa's Twitter.

I found Colin more likable and genuine than Kyle. I didn't mind him relative to some others in that cast. He just seemed young and had some unexamined privilege. There were moments that made me think his heart could be in the right place. I liked his rapport with Ruthie toward the end of the season, as well as what he contributed to the work meeting about comedians saying offensive things. The Hawaii book is a good one. I've been looking through it since I watched that season again recently on YT. What hits me about it is that this cast came in with an unusually high level of arrogance, and then they got knocked on their asses. I think several of them believed they knew how the game was played and could beat the house, so to speak, and then they got a rude awakening when they saw the footage they'd given the producers to work with and how it was assembled. Probably the only one who got away completely unscathed, got exactly what he wanted from the experience, was Teck. Colin's edit wasn't as bad as some, and maybe not as bad as it could have been. Matt, Ruthie, Justin, Kaia, and Amaya all got creamed in one way or another.

I don't have much to add on this latest post-show round that hasn't been said. We can believe one of two things; (1) Kelley, a fairly public person about whom the worst anyone said even 22 years ago was that she was boring and that she gossiped a little with Danny, has decided to smear Julie with outrageous lies. In this endeavor, she has been embraced and supported by three of five other cast members. The other two haven't commented to say Julie is getting a raw deal and none of this happened. Or (2) Julie, who vowed to be the one to "make good TV," and who's been grossly inappropriate on this series and others before it, was also grossly inappropriate in incidents not caught on camera. As bad as she seemed in what we saw, she was getting a good edit. It isn't a hard call for me. About that. Here is producer Andrew Hoegl's quote about Matt and Julie, from the 2000 New Orleans book. "I thought it was really funny to watch Matt and Julie's relationship. It was so painfully obvious that Julie was just pining away for him every second of the day. For the first month and a half, Matt was totally oblivious, and then afterward he was uncomfortable. After she realized he was uncomfortable, she did it more. She'd try to kiss him on camera! His squirming just made us laugh." That quote (and the mentality behind it) is an example of why even those of us who have fond memories of Bunim/Murray shows from the '90s and early '00s have complicated feelings about them today. That's hardly the worst behavior production encouraged (they fed Puck's "bad-boy legend" nonsense by putting him on television regularly for a decade; they invited the violent CT back for Challenge after Challenge; they didn't send Julie herself packing after the harness incident), but it's troubling. Just because it was a cute blond girl doing it didn't make sexual harassment wholesome fun. You have to wonder what effect it had on Julie if she got positive reinforcement for acting that way in 2000. The feedback could be anything from crew members giggling to producers praising/thanking her for it at the end of the season. Well, there's no "if" -- Hoegl's quote itself is positive reinforcement.

Yeah, Colin had a main-cast role on M.Y.O.B. with Lauren Graham and Katharine Towne. I'm not sure when that show was in production, but four of the eight completed episodes aired in summer 2000, at the time Real World New Orleans was running. So, it is a plausible scenario that shortly after leaving Hawaii, he got hooked up with an agent who told him that distancing himself from Bunim/Murray would be a good move for his acting career, hence his withdrawal from The Challenge and his no-show at both the 2000 and 2001 reunions. Then he was over the aspirations to an acting career by the time he joined Battle of the Sexes in 2002. I do wonder which Challenge 2000 guy got the call to be his replacement. The final lineup for the RW side was Amaya, Heather, Kat, David, Mike, and Teck. I'm thinking Miami Mike was the one whose number came up in Rolodex Roulette when they lost Colin. The Hawaii cast was heavy on wannabe Hollywood people. Teck and Ruthie obviously wanted entertainment careers. (Ruthie kept talking about "this opportunity" being taken away when they were trying to get her into alcohol treatment.) Kaia says in the book that she wants to be in movies. Matt wanted to write/direct.

It's interesting that Colin says in the Hawaii book that he'll be taking a semester off to tape the Challenge that fall. Amaya and Teck also say they'll be doing it. Colin says he hopes he and Amaya can keep it civil. But he wasn't on that Challenge, although Amaya and Teck were. If he changed his mind, was Seattle David or Miami Mike his replacement? That would have been a Real World team heavily loaded with Hawaii cast members, but it was a popular season when it was airing. Ugh. Imagine eleven more episodes of the Colin/Amaya "relationship."

I was a Chris fan, but I sometimes gravitated to the calm person in various houses (Pam and Mo in San Francisco, Rebecca in Seattle). It's fine as long as there aren't four or five such people. (Hi, London season!) I think it was just where he was. His improbable friendship with Theo was interesting to me. I don't think anyone in the Chicago cast was a waste of space. I couldn't stand some of them, but that's The Real World.

My biggest memory of Theo on the Challenge is when he was on some spinning contraption and was supposed to hold on as long as possible, and he was yelling "Oh Lord, give me strength in my arms!" and similar things the whole time. While I know he's from a religious family and I don't question the legitimacy of his beliefs, that kind of devoutness rubs me the wrong way. It seems performative, like the objective is to make sure everyone around you knows you're religious. Chris Beckman has an Instagram, if anyone's curious what he looks like, what he's painting lately, what his dogs look like, etc. One of his posts from this year commemorates his 21 years of sobriety. I know he rubbed a lot of viewers the wrong way by talking about that so much, but good for him for maintaining.

Podcaster Jess Rothschild asked Danny if the Spencer visit was as producer-contrived as the Paul visit. Per Danny, Spencer really was traveling for some conference, but he didn't want to participate in the show and didn't want to be on camera. Julie insisted. I wish I would hear something that made me dislike her less.

Kelley was also the most obviously anxious, the least at ease...certainly of the three women, probably of all seven. She didn't lightly decide to participate. Maintaining her poise and not doing anything that would embarrass Scott or herself was important to her. Julie, being a kind of bully, radared in on that as bullies do. Of course she'd be peppering with Kelley with masturbation questions (and the like). And seeing that it made Kelley uncomfortable would make her do it more. Also, if Kelley's quote of "How does it feel to be the dumb one? How does it feel to be the idiot?" is accurate, it's very revealing of things Julie has held onto about her Real World experience as the house ingenue. Reading that part made me think of how when she was on the Extreme Challenge, she worked herself up into a rage to combat the fear of crossing a tightrope. She was shouting "No one thinks I can do anything! But I can! I'm a big girl!" It was pretty embarrassing. (And it didn't work; she fell off.) But I think it was a glimpse of some real anger we've seen come out in other ways.

The last two parts of Melissa's story make me sad for what the season might have been. The Homecoming was a demonstration of that old saying about one bad apple.

Daniel D'Addario calls the season "genius reality TV." Although I soured on this Homecoming in the back half, I did enjoy his piece. A quote: "If Danny, Melissa, Kelley, and Tokyo were portraits of how lonely and isolating it can be to grow up, Julie — as the self she presented on-camera — is a portrait of how much one loses when one tries to fight the process. [...] Julie presents as someone trying to reclaim something she once had; while, for others, the conversation has moved forward, Julie continually reasserts that she belongs at the center for the noise she can make, the havoc she can cause." https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/why-real-world-homecoming-orleans-140036698.html Variety has the same piece, so pick your link. https://variety.com/2022/tv/columns/real-world-homecoming-new-orleans-1235286804/

Here's the post from the Redditor who tried to put together the real timeline using outfits, hairstyles, and other context clues. It's eye-opening and probably very close to accurate. The events presented in a more honest sequence would have made for a better season. https://www.reddit.com/r/therealworld/comments/v69vhn/organized_timeline/ I knew I was seeing creativity with the chronology, because it's Bunim/Murray and it's what they do, and some things caused my buzzer to go off. Like Julie in her hot-tub call (the one Melissa and Kelley overhear) saying she had tried to flirt with the guys there and she just didn't have the stomach for it. The only thing we'd seen from her that might qualify as flirtation at that point was her asking Tokyo to shower with her. Her statement makes more sense when you know the hot-tub call with Spencer followed her conversation with Matt (the "Why didn't you like me in 2000?" one) and her numerous attempts to do whatever she was doing with Jamie. She "flirted" with all three straight guys within the first three days.

There's a hard-to-spot arrow (light gray on white) to the right of that first slide you see. I don't think you need an IG account to click through to the others. But in case I'm wrong, someone on another forum captured her whole story in streaming form. It's good. https://streamable.com/sbs4wc Now I'll be back after the last episode. I hope it's somewhat redeeming. I was loving this season so much (even with Julie) until it went toxic at about episode 6.

It's kind of confusing. There's a series of slides, and then she finishes with a long comment. At first I thought there was only one slide. You have to click through, and the white-on-white makes it hard to see the arrow to the right. Edit: But the part about Paul is in the long comment. "For those of you who are new here and have discovered the misleading timeline, you are correct. I had already left for the visit from Paul, the swamp tour and much more."

If I Stop, Will You Stay? sounds like the title of a very turgid Lifetime movie about abuse, doesn't it? That's revealing information from Kelley about the manipulated timeline. I remember being a little surprised that she wasn't there to interact with Paul at all, because other than Danny, she was the one he knew best. The three of them went out to dinner and stuff during the original season. The biggest giveaway that things are in a weird order is Jamie's hair. It was buzzed on the sides when he first walked in in episode 1, and it's been all over the place on the long/short spectrum since. Now I'm going to avoid this thread until I see the finale.

The New York version of Homecoming was nominated in the same two categories in 2021: Best Unstructured Series and Best Ensemble Cast in an Unscripted Series. It did not win either. The awards went to Deaf U and RuPaul's Drag Race, respectively. Los Angeles Homecoming wasn't nominated for anything (by that awards group), but it aired within the same eligibility period as the New Orleans one.

She reads as riled up herself. Production "built" the club? I believe Danny said in an interview that it was Oz (it was either Oz or another well-known Bourbon Street gay bar), and that it had been closed but they reopened that night for them. Julie seems persistently to take things up or down a level to serve whatever narrative she's pushing.

Interesting post from Tokyo. "We all understand the reason I shut down and stopped sharing, but I’d like to make it up to you." Kelley has the first reply. https://www.instagram.com/p/CeZNGZFtAMg/?hl=en

The obvious swap there would have been Holly (future wife of Chadwick) in New Orleans and Kelley on Maximum Velocity with James, Theo, and the gang. Kelley's own preference to the side, I'm glad we didn't get that. Not a Holly fan.