‘The Real World Homecoming’ Is One Massive, Overdue Apology to Kevin

It’s been almost 30 years and people still get tripped up by the nature of reality television. Real, scripted—where does one end and the other begin? How much do producers and editors impact the truth? How does context shape a moment’s meaning? This has been true from the jump, too, stretching all the way back to 1992 with the first season of The Real World. Those seven strangers were as close to real as anyone’s ever been on reality TV, considering the genre didn’t exist in pop culture outside of a few PBS documentaries. Julie, Eric, Heather, Becky, Norm, Andre, and Kevin were all as real as real can be—but even 29 years ago, reality TV was still reality TV. The footage was edited and assembled by creatives who created so many archetypes that still persist in the genre today: the hunky flirt, the innocent young’un, the artsy intellectual, the funny gay guy, the broody bad boy, the life of the party… and the angry Black man.

Paramount+’s The Real World Homecoming: New York is more than just a reunion mini-series celebrating the 29th (?) anniversary of the first reality TV show to become a pop culture phenomenon. It’s also a meta commentary on the genre itself—one that, episode by episode, atones for the biggest crime committed back in Season 1: casting Kevin Powell, an activist and author and lecturer and journalist, as the angry Black man.

This stigma was real. Being a white kid from Tennessee, I completely viewed Kevin as the angry Black man when I watched the New York season in reruns, annually before the debut of a new Real World season. That’s who he was—the roommate that thought everything and everyone he lived with was racist.

It was a failure of The Real World to present his story that way, but it was a bigger cultural failure that I still thought Kevin was just an angry Black man when I was rewatching his season in the run-up to the debut of The Real World: Seattle six years after Kevin’s season aired. It’s a failure that every Black man on The Real World and Road Rules for the next, like, 20 years had at least one moment where they had to grapple—on national television—with the label they feared they’d be assigned. And it’s on me—and every white audience member—for just going along with this trope! It wasn’t until I rewatched Season 1 a few years ago that I was absolutely, completely floored by Kevin’s presence on the show, a presence I was too ignorant to even see, let alone appreciate when I was 14 years old (and 16 years old and 20 years old and…). Kevin was right. He was always right. He has never been more right than he was then and than he is now.

This is why The Real World Homecoming: New York is a visceral, powerful watch—especially for a show that was nominally advertised as a fun little reunion show crafted to get publicity for the Paramount+ launch. Why not wait for the 30th anniversary and presumably a post-COVID world? Because Paramount+ is launching this year, people! Make it happen!

But The Real World Homecoming is shockingly more than that. It is, essentially, an entire limited series that exists solely to apologize to Kevin Powell for almost 30 years of “angry Black man” racism. It is a well-deserved, overdue apology, and it has made for a lot of cathartic, emotional, and healing television.

Almost every one of Kevin’s roommates have commented on just how right Kevin was in 1992, and how absolutely wrong they were then (and probably still are now!). This is appropriate because Kevin truly did get into heated discussions with pretty much everyone in the house back then. He got frustrated with Becky for not understanding what it’s like to be pulled over by the cops repeatedly. He had to tell Andre that every Black person who expresses an opinion is immediately called threatening by white people. Heather, the only other Black roommate, did not understand where he was coming from because she was there to have fun. And most famously, he didn’t like Julie telling him that not everything is about race, which resulted in the most heated argument about racism to ever air on TV at that point. All of this aired on TV in 1992 (and in reruns every year after that) presented as “The Real World: Kevin vs. White People.” We’re even let in on a bit of 1992’s selective editing via some previously unseen footage: that argument between Kevin and Julie? It took place after the LA riots, after the miscarriage of justice that let Rodney King’s attackers walk free. The housemates watched LA burning on TV, in their NYC loft, and that footage was left on the cutting room floor. Why was Kevin so angry that night? Because a Black man was beaten by the police and it was caught on camera, and they were acquitted. Sound familiar?

So, Kevin was right, and every cast member apologizes. Heather says, “What he was dealing with at that time and how he saw it, he was right, ’cause guess what? Fast forward, where’s the lie?” Quiet Andre said, “It’s impossible to understand, even when it’s right laid bare in front of you, my jaw is on the floor when I see injustice and police brutality.” Now Andre knows that it’s not enough to be anti-racist internally; he has to be proactive and demonstrate it so that his daughter can see. Julie—the country gal who once asked Heather if she sold drugs because she had a beeper—agreed and said that it’s her job as a parent to not make the same mistakes her parents made. She’s back in Birmingham, making sure that her kids know about their town’s racist history. Her 17-year-old daughter is an ambassador at the Civil Rights Institute!

Watching Kevin react to all of this, changes that you have to admit he was crucial in instigating in all of these kids in 1992—Kevin is owed this moment in television history. He was right.

And, because every family reunion has to have a fight, Becky remains the holdout from 1992. Footage from then paired with footage from now just shows that she hasn’t really changed all that much. Yesterday she bragged about her stellar education and how she learned about all the “revolutionaries” in elementary school (?), and today she’s praising the Afro-Brazilian dance classes she’s taken for helping her to not see color or something. It’s not a good look, and Norm—not Kevin!—is the one who gets the most frustrated with his bestie Becky and snaps at her. This is the first Real World fight where Kevin is not alone. He has Andre and Norm and Julie backing him up—the change in dynamics is real and a long time coming.

Of course, racism isn’t solved just because your daughter works at a civil rights museum or because you think police brutality is both 1. real and 2. wrong. Praising some of Kevin’s white roommates for doing the bare minimum is not the look. The point is that The Real World Homecoming: New York is the lone example of a reality TV franchise essentially dedicating an entire series to righting something they got very, very wrong. And hopefully everyone who watched The Real World back in the day will watch this series and be checked by this series. Because it’s not just on Kevin Powell to speak the truth when it comes to racism in America. That burden is on what we call “reality” TV too, and the very first reality TV show is finally making amends.

Stream The Real World Homecoming: New York on Paramount+