‘The Real World Homecoming: New Orleans’ Episode 1 Recap: “The Real 7”

My name’s Dave, and I have a secret: I am completely fascinated by The Real World Homecoming. To me, it is as revolutionary as the original; it’s the characters who created the reality television template, people you feel like you grew up with but they’ve never met you, checking back in and giving you something new to think about. (That thing is your mortality, mostly.) Season 1 assembled the original Real World cast in the original loft for a reunion that we needed even more than Becky needs to think before she speaks. Season 2, which featured the Los Angeles cast, was a meditation on collective trauma. And now, like Riverdale or Lost or some other show with troubled hot people and time jumps, TRWH has leapt ahead for Season 3. We’re skipping right from season two to season nine, from LA to New Orleans.

I think this is the exact right move. My understanding is that these reunions don’t happen unless every cast member agrees to come back, and since season three’s Rachel is trying to be a serious Fox News broadcaster, she’s out (until she learns there’s no such thing as a serious Fox News broadcaster). Her husband, Boston’s Sean, is in Congress now, so he’s too busy doing the important statesman’s work of saying “Let’s go Brandon” five hundred times a day and checking Twitter to see if he’s trending. Even the cast of the London season has forgotten about the London season, and Miami, Seattle and Hawaii are probably waiting for someone else of their general time frame to make the first move.

New Orleans the cast to kick off a new, more self-aware era of Homecoming. They were a new kind of cast: they’d gotten to watch enough of The Real World in the ‘90s to make an informed choice about sending in a tape, so they don’t come off like unwitting victims. They’ve gotten to watch a couple of these Homecoming seasons to know what to watch out for, and to understand that sometimes that thing is your own mouth. Plus they’re just an entertaining bunch of kids who I still think of as kids even though they’re in their 40s.

So how about you, and you, and me get into a menagerie and talk about the season premiere of The Real World: Homecoming: New Orleans?

A look back at the 2000 casting process reveals that Melissa showed up ready to be famous, that Kelley was not the sorority girl the show assumed her to be, and that David could not possibly have known how much that “Come On Be My Baby Tonight” song would haunt the rest of his days on this planet. Julie seemed to realize that the show would get her in trouble with the Mormon church, Matt was an abstinence activist who looked like a cartoon raver, and Jamie was a Chicagbro getting a business degree at Cornell. And then there was Danny, who says he didn’t have much of a life plan and was still mostly in the closet when he applied, and therefore did not know that his life plan would involve being one of the most visible out queer figures in the country.

Let’s just get this out of the way right now: in the present day, everybody looks fantastic. I know it’s not about that, but also yes it kind of is: part of the reason to tune in is to see how everyone has held up, and just so I don’t have to keep stopping the action to tell you everyone looks good, please know it’s true, and it’s also true that I’ll probably stop the action and tell you everyone looks good anyway. They all kiss good-looking families and pack good-looking bags and tell the camera how much they’re looking forward to the experience, and Julie says “I think it’s going to be fun,” and I think Julie might be wrong about that.

As in the original season, Melissa is the first to show up at the airport. She’s got fresh flowers for the house, and she’s got mild-to-moderate misgivings. “After filming, being famous was really hard,” she says. “People feel like they really do know you.” I can relate to this, having been on MTV in a different capacity at this time in history, and I can also tell you that when this cast would come around the studio, I was starstruck by them. Such was the power of The Real World. Anyway, Melissa says she hasn’t been together with the cast in decades, and she’s “really excited to see…” and then after a short but significant pause, “…a lot of them.”

Danny lives in Vermont now, and he tells us a little bit about the experience of being famous and out in the year 2000 when that was still rare, when a person in that position had a lot of responsibility on his shoulders. Danny had no preparation before it, and no aftercare after it, and while I think we’re going to get into that in a deeper and more meaningful way in the next 8 weeks, the eyes and the beard say Danny’s done some thinking about this whole situation. Melissa did not bring a big bag of rice this time around, but she did bring toilet paper. Melissa will show up to your event prepared.

Julie seems extremely nervous, and soon enough, we extremely find out why she should be: the show did indeed get her in trouble with her church and her college, and we get some hints that her own behavior in the interim has gotten her into trouble with her housemates. She is crying before they even get her onto the streetcar to the house. But she looks good! See?

We will not be going back to the Belfort, the original mansion, because in the present day it is either a meth lab or a boutique hotel, we can’t be sure which. Melissa describes the decor of the Belfort as “like the set of a Black sitcom,” which is perfect. The new place looks like the 2022 version of that, which is “something some kicky young Christian couple rehabbed in 48 hours on HGTV.” It will do.

I don’t know whether Kelley exudes “life coach energy,” or whether I just want her to coach my life. She is, as before, super polished and poised and clever and she looks like she’s observing something about the moment that she’s going to tell you about privately later. In short: my favorite kind of person. “That’s a whole-ass celebrity’s wife,” Melissa reminds us, as though we needed reminding that Kelley is married to Scott Wolf, who was still playing Bailey Salinger on Party of Five when this season was being filmed. It bears pointing out that Melissa too is at least a partial-ass celebrity’s wife: she’s married to Justin Beck of hardcore legends Glassjaw, whose 2000 album Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Silence I tried to listen to while I was writing this, but it is too aggro for this moment, so I will revisit it again later this afternoon when I go for a long run to try to look as good as the cast of The Real World Homecoming: New Orleans.

David goes by the name “Tokyo” now, and he wears a terrycloth headband down low over his eyebrows. These are both things that fall under the category of Big Choices. We get no explanation up top, and it is not clear whether any explanation will be satisfying. These facts simply are. David I mean Tokyo also wears a series of jackets from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Not the album cover, the movie. David I mean Tokyo is perplexing. And if you recall, “perplexing” was kind of his brand in the original season. It is interesting that all three Homecoming seasons have featured Black men who don’t quite fit in with the rest of their casts, and whose reaction to that alienation is written off by the rest of the cast as aggression or ego. I wonder if we’ll get into that.

Matt is a spokesman for the anti-aging properties of making a big deal out of not having sex until marriage. Dude has not aged a single day. Danny asks him whether he’s been drinking the blood of children, and he has not, but he has been having children. He has six. But for real: he lives in Arizona and he still looks like he’s 19. The arid Southwest will age a person — did you know the character of Walter White is supposed to be 27 years old? It’s true! — but not Matt. So if you’re young and you’re not having sex and you’re upset about it, I guess the good news is wait 22 years and you’ll have better skin than most of your peers.

In clips from the original season, we are reminded that Jamie has always understood the sexual power of the backyard fitted ball cap. He is now the cast member who looks the most like what you were raised to expect a man in his 40s to look like: the hair is salt-and-pepper, there is evidence of just the slightest middle-age paunch. But of course he wears these things extremely well and he looks good as fuck. Jamie was a student at Cornell at the time, and then the show ended and he did one or two of those Challenges, and we have not yet explored the long-term effect of having taken part in those shows, and I wonder whether we’ll be doing that with Jamie or whether he’ll just be going “woo-hoo” a lot. Really I’ll take either.

Julie shows up last, and she goes directly into Danny’s arms to weep and apologize. So something is afoot here, and we find out what it is pretty quickly: you know how Real World castmates go on speaking tours after the show is over? High schools and colleges and whatnot, talking about conflict resolution or diversity or whatever they are obligated to do for 40 minutes before they end up at your fraternity party? Julie was on that circuit with Melissa and Danny, and apparently she or one of her reps circulated some rumors about the other two, in an attempt to siphon off some of their gigs. Danny assures her they’ll talk more in depth about it, Melissa just kind of icily says hi. It is clear from the jump that Julie will not be able to relax in this house, and it is just as clear that she shouldn’t.

Over cocktails, the cast processes the Tokyo thing; it’s because he found himself immersed in the Japanese style of writing, so he made the name change, and everyone’s kind of like: sure. Someone pulls out an old 2000-era TV Guide that says Melissa and Julie were planning to move to Los Angeles together, which Julie says they did and Melissa says she can’t remember, so we are actually going to get into the whole story RIGHT AWAY. Melissa says her agents got word of an email from Julie to college bookers, to the effect of “Melissa doesn’t sign autographs, and her fee is too high, but I do and I’ll work cheap.” Julie says she didn’t write it. Danny says his agents got word of an email from Julie saying that Danny is of low moral quality and shouldn’t talk to kids. Julie is like “okay, maybe I did do something like that, but who knows?” And it escalates, and Julie cries, and Melissa dismisses it all right off the bat: “You think because you’re crying, that I’m going to look crazy, and see, that’s what we ain’t gonna do.” Julie goes to her room, and later Tokyo goes to check on her and she’s like “They’re all talking about me, aren’t they?” And Tokyo replies in a way that is both reassuring and unspeakably cruel: “No.” (Did I do a control-F in this paragraph and make all the Davids Tokyos? Yes.)

Julie tells Tokyo she didn’t write the emails, or at least not most of them, but she had a lot of agents booking work for her at the time, so it might have been one of them. And he tells her the absolute truth: “If it was done for her benefit, it was her that wrote it.” True! Your agents work for you, so by the transitive property, their behavior is your behavior. If they did that shit for her, then by definition, she did that shit. Julie agrees: the buck should stop with her. Which seems like a 2004 revelation more than a 2022 one, but at least she got there.

We end on a legitimately unnerving image: Julie hovering outside Melissa’s bedroom, preparing to give a long-overdue real apology, steeling herself for a righteous and thorough roasting by Melissa, who is extremely funny and has been getting ready for this moment since the release of “Hey Ya.” Julie is shifting from foot to foot like a child who is about to be spanked, as she finally reaches the threshold and asks Melissa if she can come in, we cut to black. Total savagery by the producers, and I am here for it.

I hope the two of them can work it out, because I like them together, but the season supercut features a moment of Julie exiting a cab face-first, so I am not optimistic. But we are back. Ba-Bo-BWAY.

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now. He also hosts the Real World podcast Truu Stowray, available wherever you get your podcasts.