[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

Was it just me, or was there a mass glow-up on the Thursday show? I know it picked up right after the one(s) before, but the hair stood out to me as a lot better on several people than I felt it had looked recently. Willow. Liz. Carly. Laura. Sasha (her makeup too). Michael and Brando, on the male side.   

Not poor Cyrus, though. Maybe we're supposed to feel sorry for him because his mother didn't love him and never taught him about hot-oil treatments.  

I don't ship or even feel an attachment to Sasha/Brando (...Saber?), but I did think they were kind of cute looking at the ultrasound pictures.  

Nixon Falls has been such a swing and miss. I wonder if anyone anywhere is into this story and doesn't want it over with last month. If you love Sonny as Port Charles mob kingpin, you're pissed he's away from his twu wuv, his bestie, and his Territory. If you hate Sonny, you can't even take any satisfaction from the Port Charles world moving on from him, because he's still on all the time, his personality isn't any different, and Tan-O scenes are insulting when not dull. The people who play Lenny and Phyllis are good actors who are trying, but they're just there to prop "Mike" and to midwife the Smike/Nina romance. They're being written as sweet but dumb people who, thank God, had shrewd, hardworking, good-idea-sprouting Mike fall into their lives to save their business, rescue them from danger, and tell them what's what on every subject. I might have an easier time digesting this if they had had him helping a young couple who were just starting out.  

I'm still the opposite of caught up in Chase's race-against-time medical drama, even though they're making him up like a Halloween ghoul now. I do like LIz and Finn and how she tries to rein in his drama queeniness and keep him on task.

Edit: Carly sounded remarkably insincere when she was talking to Michael and Willow and expressed sympathy for Chase's situation.

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

4 hours ago, methodwriter85 said:

I was on fandom boards in the late 90's/early 2000's and the first clear one I remember is LiAson, aka Liz/Jason. It was when Jason came back and he and Liz started circling each other. The actress playing Robin had left and they needed a sweet young heroine to play against Jason so they decided on Liz, who was struggling to love Lucky with a drastically different, Abercrombie-face yet much shorter height. That storyline was probably 2002 or so? 

I'm not sure when Liason as a name for them was first coined, but the initial Jason/Liz tease (and resulting fanbase) was in '99, before Jason left the first time. Robin was out of the picture, Lucky was recently "dead," they had already been friendly through Emily, and there was obviously a spark. It intensified when Liz harbored and played nurse to Jason at her studio when he was shot by a rival mobster. She also kept Carly away (Jason didn't want to see her; he knew about her sex with Sonny), which was the start of that feud. But Burton left to pursue other things, which kept it from getting very far.   

Burton made short-term returns in 2000 and 2001, and Jason's Liz connection was part of his story both times, even though the Jacob Young Lucky was in the picture by then. Then he was back full time in 2002, and Liason got trashed. (Zander, Courtney, Ric, Sam, etc.)  

I think portmanteaux were just a thing by that point with fanbases, including fans of prime-time shows. I never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I know its fans had a lot of them for the various pairings.  

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I think earlier couples might have been retroactively named, but that was the first couple I can remember getting a portmaneau in real time as the storyline was happening. At the same time it was also popular to give a ship a name that described them but wasn't a mashing of their names, like Scrubs for Robin and Patrick when that storyline was going on circa 2005. I don't think you see that as much anymore.

I've been privately thinking of Britt and Jason as Shake 'n Blink. 

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

12 minutes ago, dubbel zout said:

Not me. I find this trope just as bad as the baby-crazed lady must have her own bio child. It's insulting to women, to say the very least.

Holly as the Nursery-Rhyme Stalker and eventual childnapper wasn't a good story at all on GL, and it comes up sometimes in "famous bad soap stories" lists. So it's not anything I seriously think would be a good idea. I'm just over the St. Willow writing, I find her relationships with both guys in this triangle boring, and lunacy seems like a good alternative.

But I don't generally find soap writing (even for characters I like) to be ennobling to either women or men. I think they appeal to our baser instincts. Even when soaps try to keep up with the changing times, they're so rooted in the old traditions. 

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

On 6/4/2021 at 4:02 PM, YaddaYadda said:

Does Willow even know Maxie? I can't even remember them interacting.

 

On 6/4/2021 at 5:47 PM, Blackie said:

I know, I looked up and thought why was she in Maxie's hospital room.

 

On 6/4/2021 at 7:42 PM, Kiki777 said:

How did Willow even come to be in Maxie’s Hospital room?  I had to rewind it a couple times - she was just THERE.  Is she so baby-obsessed she’ll hone in on any woman who’d just given birth?  Does she even know Maxie?

 

On 6/4/2021 at 7:59 PM, Benji said:

Right ?!  I'm glad other people are mentioning this. It seemed like she just "appeared" for no reason. And Michael came in after that, so its not like she accompanied him or followed him into the room.

I think for the rest of the time Willow's on the show, anything related to a baby, whether happy or sad, will result in a Willow visit, shortly followed by a monologue about how triggering it is for her. Maybe it will stop when she has her own biological child...which I'm sure will be on the other side of a long angsty story about her trouble conceiving. Right now she's all about being Wiley's adoptive mother, but you know it's coming. Willow = child-related material. (She even came in as a schoolteacher.) 

Me, I wish they'd have her go crazy and kidnap all the young children of Port Charles, in an homage/ripoff to the "classic" story for Holly on Guiding Light.

[Spoilers and Speculation: Clink Boom and Cheese Fondue]

I think they're writing Sam and Dante in this combative way because Sam's relationships are "supposed" to start prickly, as that's been common for her. (Did she and Patrick have that kind of dynamic when they launched? I wasn't watching.) 

But it's dumb, because she and Dante are supposed to have been friendly long term, not new acquaintances like Jax, Sonny, and Jason were back when the country was newly at war with Iraq. Also, this mouthy rebel-girl persona worked better when the character wasn't a mother of two played by a 45-year-old with a who-gives-a-shit vibe and a face full of whatever.  

Characters who don't grow and stay stuck in what supposedly worked a long time ago are boring, and it's about half the ones on the canvas.

[RW: Miami (1996)]

8 hours ago, Bastet said:

That job, complete with furnished apartment, Cynthia wound up with in the end sounded like some shady sales thing that would get ripped out from under her in a hot minute, so I hope things worked out.

I read after the season that that's exactly what happened. She was narrating as if it were a Cinderella story, and production was fine with appearing to leave it there for storytelling purposes, but it wasn't all it appeared to be and it was very short-lived. She was back in her native Oakland area very soon, where I think she has remained.  

Then a couple years after her season (edit: filmed only one year after, I guess) she did Road Rules All-Stars with Jon, Rachel, Eric, and Sean (with Puck as Master of Ceremonies), which was sort of a one-team trial balloon for the Challenge. None of those cast members was exactly a favorite of mine, but that trip was fun to watch. Good chemistry.

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

5 hours ago, DanaK said:

Cyrus getting shot in the leg was a rather weak ending for him. A SWAT guy should have plugged him full of holes and had him carted off in a body bag.

Then, we could have said, "They Zandered his ass!" 

2 hours ago, Chanandler said:

My wacky theory about Austin is this: He worked at the Facility Jax Found while Michael was a patient there. Bonus hackery points if he developed a crush on Carly, the braveandstrong mother who spent oh-so-many hours at her comatose son’s bedside. <eyeroll>
I mean, that explanation is not great, but it’s better than Austin being yet another Corinthos or a member of some other mob family.

It's not a bad theory. I'm thinking either the connection is tied to The Facility that Jax Found, or he did time with Michael, or he was doctoring at the jail and he treated Michael after he was raped (and thus we're going to do "Michael's trauma, revisited"; Michael can talk about it with Willow and she can do the characteristic Willow shit) -- something that has to do with one of the few times Michael was away from the rest of Port Charles and in the orbit of other people. I don't think he's a Corinthos. Maybe I'm just hoping.

[RW: New Orleans (2000)]

I had been neglecting this thread. Thanks to a tip from one of our forum posters here, I just listened to a 2020 Danny interview. His life has been anything but boring in the last 20 years. He's funny and perceptive, but there's been a lot of rough stuff I didn't know about, like a serious stalker in the '00s. Also, the famous relationship with Paul really deteriorated and became dysfunctional and he stayed in it for too long. 

On a lighter note, he ran into Melissa at a club in NYC long after their season. They were both very drunk, they were hugging and catching up, and she threw up on his shoes. Always a lightweight, that one. 

On 4/27/2021 at 8:28 PM, ljenkins782 said:

I wasn't a huge fan of Kelley and Danny only because their friendship seemed to be mostly forged in admiring each other's appearances and feeling superior to the others. In those post-season books they used to do, there was a lot  of snide commentary, particularly from Kelley, about how ridiculous Melissa was for trying to have some kind of epiphany or get some meaning out of the experience

Eh. I didn't really see them that way. I mean, if I wanted to float a cynical take on Melissa's friendship with Jamie, I could say it was mostly about her thinking he was so beautiful that she wanted to gaze at and touch him (she talked about Jamie's looks about a thousand times more than Danny or Kelley mentioned each other's looks), and Jamie's getting off on soaking up the adoration. But I don't really think that about them, even though there may be a kernel of truth in it. I think they meshed well and had good times. When you get down to it, that's what most friendships are built on. Obviously, the D/K one has stood the test of time better than most. 

Danny and Kelley were definitely at the prettier end of the scale for that cast, but something I think a lot of people missed is that they were both also kind of anxious. I saw it a lot in her. He masked better, but he's open about his struggles now.  

On 5/9/2021 at 8:16 PM, ljenkins782 said:

Another piece of the Julie story that came out later was that Kelley and Melissa were both being told things about the other that turned out maybe not to be true and once they talked, they realized those things came from Julie. She was playing them against each other and they didn't spend enough time together to realize what was true and what wasn't.

Oh, yes. Melissa and Kelley both said that. There was a lot of evidence that Julie was a major instigator. I was never a fan, even early in her Real World run (just never thought she seemed genuine), but the attention made her worse and worse. Maybe she's grown a lot. 

[RW: Boston (1997)]

Kameelah (or "Dr. Kameelah Phillips") is awesome now. Her patients love her, and she's collected numerous community service awards. She's someone I can say I knew was going to make good when I was watching Real World Boston, and the little bit about her I didn't like seemed to be gone already when she did Extreme Challenge four years later. Just like boss Anthony said, some people are talkers, others are doers, and Kameelah is a doer. 

She also did the Bunim/Murray experience the right way: she got it out of her system young and then got down to adulting. I don't think she's appeared on official B/M television since the 2001 mega-reunion that aired between New Orleans and B2NY. (One of my vivid memories of that is when Puck was being Puck at the photo shoot and she literally started to go after him, and people had to get between them.)

[RW: Miami (1996)]

This one was kind of a growing-pains season. They didn't want another London, and the format and tone went through the first major shift. It's the embryo of Las Vegas, which, love it or hate it (I hated it), was another season that started a new chapter for the series and changed people's expectations of what they'd see on The Real World. You could say with Miami, Bunim-Murray committed to trash TV; with Vegas, they embraced toxic-waste TV. 

This was the first time I could remember watching a Real World season and having trouble following the storytelling. The way people were or weren't getting along from one episode to the next didn't make any sense to me. In New York and San Francisco, either because the baseline stability level of the housemates was higher or because the storytelling and editing were neater, I always knew who was friends and who was having problems. In Miami (and again later in Hawaii, which was a slicker, more amusing remix of Miami), I'd think, "Wait a minute? Weren't they feuding? Did I miss something?"

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

18 hours ago, ljenkins782 said:

In watching back a few more episodes on Youtube, I realized that I can kinda see the appeal of Kyle when he's being his normal self (in other words, when the camera isn't focused entirely on him). The episode where he walks an extremely drunk Keri home is funny, she is trying SO hard to pretend she's completely fine when she's so completely not and he kinda needles her drunk ass the entire journey home. But every time he's really conscious of the cameras, he puts this weird ass voice on and gets all pompous and irritating.

Kyle made the big mistake (and he wasn't the first or last) of trying to control the narrative and the way he was presented. For his trouble, he came off as the least genuine of the seven. I don't think any of them could ever forget the cameras were there, but I felt I was really seeing who Theo, Aneesa, and Keri were, good points and bad. I felt I was often seeing Kyle's performances of "sincerity" and "sensitivity" and "inner conflict."

The most important piece of advice anyone could get before doing this show was to just be who you are. The directors and editors had more experience at this; it wasn't a good idea to try to outsmart them. Matt in Hawaii is another who tried to beat the system and got burned. 

[RW B2NY (2001)]

This is the one season of the first 11 that I'd never want to see an episode of again. I thought it was hurt from the get-go by the gimmicky casting special, so that in the first episode of the actual season, we were seeing people with prior impressions of each other, rather than true introductions. But the bigger problem was, as someone said above, that the cast didn't jell, even though some of them got along well enough. It was just tedious. When I was watching it in real time, it seemed to grind on endlessly. Even though there was more screaming and conflict, I found it more boring than London had been. 

Rachel was the most forgettable of all the RW "sheltered young things having new experiences" in the seasons I saw (the two Julies, Jon, Cory, Kat, Elka, et al.). 

I do remember being surprised when I leafed through the book (not one I'd have wanted to buy) and some of their comments about each other were nicer than I was expecting. I remember, for instance, Nicole talking about what a well-mannered gentleman Kevin was. She wasn't being sarcastic, either.

[RW: San Francisco (1994)]

Here's a good recent "looking back" article about a famous RWSF scene, with Cory at the center: the time she asked Mohammed's girlfriend if she was "part white." 

https://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/2021/02/real-world-identity-millennials-killed-the-video-star-excerpt/

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

23 hours ago, choclatechip45 said:

For those who watched this when it aired what was the reception to the cast? Where any of them fan favorites? A few episodes in nobody seems all that likable. Every season up to this point seemed to have some likable cast members a few episodes in.

I was following it on Television Without Pity in 2002. I don't remember at the time many people expressing that the cast was unusually hard to like or watch, and the early episodes were received with relief. The prior season (Back to New York) had been very unpopular at TWoP, with even the recapper expressing that she was bored and struggling to continue long before it was over. The producers seemed to realize that that season had problems, because they kept bringing other people in for variety. They even let each cast member choose a reject from the casting special to come to the Hamptons with them. 

Opinions of the Chicago cast shifted over the course of the season in a typical way. Initially, Theo was the most hated for his hardline homophobia and combativeness. Tonya got a lot of side-eyeing for "He's...black" on first seeing Theo, and then saying something about her anxiety over interracial living. Kyle was well liked at first. 

By the end of the season, Kyle and Cara were getting the most forum hate. Throughout the season, Keri and Chris got the least (Keri was definitely the TWoP "fan favorite"). Aneesa had fans for her humor, drama, and honesty.

To compare to New Orleans, when that season was airing, a lot of people found Melissa grating and over the top in the first several episodes, and she was adored by the end, while Julie's sheltered-ingenue routine was starting to wear thin (a process that continued on the Extreme Challenge, which began just a couple months later). Everyone hated Jamie at the start, because he had had such a "privileged white boy" intro in the casting special and had called Kameelah "Shaka Zulu," but most had mellowed toward him by the end of the NO season. 

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I do remember in 2004 Tonya did an interview and when asked if she kept in touch with anyone and she said something along the lines of "No one besides Chris would you want to keep in touch with everyone from my season."

Yeah, but I'm considering the source. Tonya ran Kyle a close race for my least-favorite roommate, and he'd probably be easier than she was to actually be around, especially if a person were completely not into him romantically or sexually at any point.

I had disliked B2NY, but Vegas was the season that made me feel it had turned into something that just wasn't for me anymore. Chicago was the last one I liked.

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

5 hours ago, dubbel zout said:

He's too mustache-twirlingly evil to be an anti-hero. He might have been one at the beginning, when he was trying to make amends for being Faison's son, but now that he's embraced his dastardly genetic heritage, that's dunzo.

He definitely had a heel turn, or went from gray to black.

Since the resumption of new episodes after the hiatus last spring/summer, Show has been tacitly acknowledging that some things were not working out. A few that come immediately to mind: Julian still hanging around, running his gastropub and not adding much else, years after what looked like an exit story. Franco's tumor removal and transformation to gentle family man (yes, Friz had a fanbase, but he was always going to be polarizing, and the resistance was intense). The Sam/Jason pairing, which never regained whatever luster it had had 10-15 years ago. Peter as conflicted and quasi-sympathetic. Dev as the fourth member of the teen set. 

In all cases the recognitions took too long, and there's no guarantee that the new stories will be any better (Nixon Falls? Millow? Sam and Dante?), but I do think they've tried to clear out some deadwood and course-correct.

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

On 5/31/2021 at 12:09 AM, ljenkins782 said:

I watched this one the other night, the arrangements are a little awkward, Cara/Keri/Kyle doesn't work as well as it would have in the earlier days of the season. It's clear that Kyle and Keri aren't on great terms and Cara is clearly taking Kyle's side, to the point of actually physically lifting herself up and moving toward him at times. Keri isn't inclined to laugh at Kyle's stories and both Kyle and Cara are pretty lukewarm to Keri's stories. 

Yes. It might have been an improvement if they'd put her in a trio with Chris and Tonya, although they never would have, because Kyle/Keri was such a story that season (like Colin/Amaya...but now with 75 percent more female backbone). Keri tries to put on her game face and get through it, and she does loosen up a little as it progresses, but at the beginning she's icy. Like, "Get me out of here."

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

The Real World You Never Saw for this season is also on YouTube, in much better quality than the episodes. It looks like a rip from a DVD, whereas the episodes were from someone's VHS copies (decent picture but lo-fi muddy sound).  

I'd never seen the RWYNS for this season. I was never much of a fan of RWYNS, having seen the Hawaii and New Orleans ones. I'm not big on bathroom humor and pratfalls, which tend to make up a lot of the content. But sometimes the cast members are more likable and at ease in them. 

This one is fairly entertaining if you liked this season/cast. I guess they filmed it close to the end of their time in Chicago, and as usual, the cast members are reminiscing and setting up the clips in 3/2/2 groups. Kyle is seated with both of his "love interests," Keri and Cara. Aneesa and Theo are predictably put together. That leaves Chris (who probably did the least arguing in this cast, and so could be with anyone) on Tonya duty. No one has seen completed episodes, so he has to tactfully break the news to her about the kidney-stones song, of which we get an unaired beginning.  

There's some stuff very reminiscent of famous moments on earlier seasons. A bird gets into the house and they're trying to catch it, which is something that actually was a B-plot of an episode in Seattle. At the end of the season, the Chicago cast searches for and invades the control room, which was the finale of the original New York season. 

Cara had a crush on a handsome Asian-American director, which went unreciprocated. That director says that he cared about all the kids, but even now that the season has ended, he would never act on anything with Cara. No New York Becky hijinks for him! 

Lots of bathroom humor and pratfalls, of course. A segment on Aneesa's vibrator. 

There's a cruel but funny segment on the dumbness (or "sheltered" quality, if you want to be nice about it) of Tonya. She thinks the production company is "Bill Murray Productions." She got more phone messages than anyone -- mostly from Justin -- but she never learned how to access them in all the time they were there, even though Chris reminds her that the code is simply "1-2-3-4." She didn't know where Chicago was on a United States map, and she believed Kyle when he pointed to Southwest Texas. She said they were so close to Mexico that they should walk there. 

Keri lied to some guy in a bar that she was the daughter of the actress who played J.R.'s wife on Dynasty, and then was embarrassed when she later learned she was mixing up Dallas and Dynasty.

Theo and Aneesa each had a lot more women than made it into the show. Cara wishes she had kept her own hook-ups offscreen. There was also a six-person gay-and-lesbian shower scene we never saw (Aneesa, Veronica, Chris and three male friends I don't think we ever saw on the show), which I now remember seeing in a preseason teaser, so there's an old mystery cleared up. 

Kyle dressed in Chris-like clothes and sunglasses and imitated all his mannerisms, and Chris didn't even realize he was being imitated. He just complimented Kyle on his new style and said he should keep it, because he looked great. 

Lots more, but I'll leave people some discoveries. It's not a bad way to spend 45 minutes. 

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

I've been watching some episodes today, with my interest rekindled. Fun. It seems so long ago, and things keep jumping out that date it, like Kyle out somewhere on on a pay phone next to posters for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Cast Away. 

The Dr. Pepper product placement is embarrassing. They were sponsors that season, and I remember that because the commercials with the Garth Brooks jingle were running in every break ("Be you, do what you do!"). But a five-year-old would watch this and know they must have been sponsors. Dr. Pepper and Diet Dr. Pepper cans are everywhere. It isn't just in the RW house, either. Even the little kids painting the murals are sucking down the Dr. Pepper. Kyle has one of his college friends visiting at one point (not Djordje, another one), and they're looking in the refrigerator, and the friend says, "I'll have a Jim Beam and Coke...I mean, Jim Beam and Dr. Pepper." LOL.

[GH History Lessons: Because History is Always Repeating Itself]

When the OLTL Three were hastily written out in 2013 because Prospect Park had the rights to the characters, did other characters mention any of them by name? I know that we had laughs over Carly's multiple frantic mentions of "Michael's girlfriend," but I can't remember if Todd and McBain got the same immediate un-personing. 

[Episode Discussion II: The TFGH]

7 hours ago, lala2 said:

Ahhh . . . okay! I couldn't remember when they mentioned it. I thought it was mentioned when he went from Silas to Finn, but I don't know. LOL! I'm just glad to skip the whole "you look like X person who just died or left town." 

No, you were right. They did that at least a couple of times in the early Finn days. "You look so much like this other doctor who worked here!" Finn's character bio at GH Fandom says "multiple times," but I remember two. One of them was Sam. 

[Daytime Emmys: This Year, It's Actually on TV…Oops, Spoke Too Soon]

It's impressive that Brianna Lane got a nomination out of being a temp recast. That can't be something that's happened often. 

There's no tactful way to say this, but some of these nominations suggest that people were filling out ballots and didn't want to have categories with an all-white list of names in the present climate.

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

Theo did change after the hot tub/shower incident. He was defiant when Chris talked to him about it, saying he was going to keep bringing women over (even listing all the days of the week Chris could expect to see his hook-ups), but then we didn't see any more of it.  

Something in the reunion that wasn't surprising to me is the revelation of Tonya's abusiveness to crew members/production. We saw a little of it when she was dramatically leaving the house to fly home to Walla Walla, and she snarled at someone off-camera that she wasn't supposed to be lifting (which was the cue for the crew members to ignore that this was a pseudo-documentary and run to wait on her). She did make it hard to feel sorry for her sometimes. Treating the crew badly is always going to get you an unflattering edit, even when you don't give them as much to work with as she did.

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

2 hours ago, Bastet said:

Tonya seemed genuinely upset at seeing herself and realizing she was not really the person she thought she was and needed to change some things about herself. I think she'd have been better off getting back to the real real world and leaving this one behind, but I'm sure the Challenge money was hard to resist.

It's sad to watch that today with awareness of the ways she did change on her numerous Challenge appearances. The only through line connecting all the different Tonyas on screen over the years was deep neediness. I don't think money was the sole draw on the Challenge, although there was that too. It was also the attention and low-level celebrity. Certain regulars really began to consider themselves stars of an ongoing series. Because they were "good drama," they'd always have first refusal rights when a new season's cast was being put together, unless they had physically assaulted someone or otherwise disqualified themselves from consideration.  

Re: Aneesa's crudeness in Chicago. I think it was 75 percent really who she was and 25 percent needling once she saw that Tonya was uncomfortable with it. I generally liked her, but she could be that way.  

Something very "period" about that reunion, on brand for 2002, is the way the host got into the topic of Cara's hook-ups. She was single and 22, and she was right to bristle that the guy even went there with the "s" word. He didn't take the same approach when he moved on to Theo, and he wouldn't have if he'd been interviewing any other male "playa" from Real World past. (How many women did Teck in Hawaii or David in New Orleans bring around?) I mean, Cara's dating was a topic with interesting things to explore (like her claims to be able to have casual sex with no strings, and her occasional inability to stick to the "no strings" part), but she didn't deserve to be chided just for having multiple partners. 

Kyle gets roasted in the book's section on the Keri/Kyle relationship. Nobody, not Keri, the other cast members, or production, supports his version of events. Producer Anthony Dominici says Kyle was very much into it at first, but then started trying to do damage control to preserve his relationship with Nicole, to the point of passing notes to other cast members to influence what they said on camera.

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

I haven't seen that reunion since it first aired, but I remember it was super-uncomfortable. The host was awful even for a Real World or Challenge reunion host. He didn't know when to follow up or how to manage questioning seven people. Keri was in the worst possible place after seeing the last several episodes and hearing what Cara and Kyle had been saying behind her back. (Totally understandable.) She really let them have it. And everyone ganged up on Tonya, who was in tears. Theo, Aneesa, and Chris were just kind of "present."

33 minutes ago, Hiyo said:

I liked London. Yeah it wasn't the most exciting but it was nice and chill, had lots of nice London location porn. Probably the last time you had a majority of the cast doing their own thing, before the set-up of them all working together contrivance started.

I think the mandated group job was a direct response to the aimlessness of London.

My feeling about London is that it's okay in small doses. They were mostly likable people, some of whom would never have been cast just a few years later.

It's just one that, when MTV would have marathons, I couldn't handle watching in a big block of episodes.

[RW: Chicago (2002)]

Chris says in the book that when he watched the Hawaii season, the Ruthie intervention episodes really hit home for him, because he had been through the same thing with his family and friends intervening. I tended to believe him; he didn't seem prone to exaggeration. I always wondered if his problem was exclusively alcohol or more, because he had some scars on his arms.  

It's possible if he'd been on the show a couple years earlier, he'd have been very different, if not as healthy. I think Bunim-Murray caught him at a certain time, and "recovery guy" was his main thing, besides being an artist. When he passed the swimming test to be a lifeguard, he was even voice-overing about his recovery in connection with that. It was implied that he was exercising all the time after getting sober, which is pretty common. (Although some people go in the opposite direction and start eating all the time.) 

All I didn't like were his cheesy moments, like giving Cara a pep talk and asking her to repeat self-affirming statements. That was full-on Stuart Smalley.