Who Killed the Video Star: The Story of MTV | Look At Me

Before we get started, I should let you know this episode discusses suicide and drug abuse, so please take consideration before listening.

I think it played out exactly the way that it needed to play out. I think that reality TV came into our reality for a global purpose.

That is Eric Neis, if you watched the first season of The Real World, and the data shows pretty clearly that you did, you know? He's one of the seven strangers picked to live in a loft, and one of the first seven people with a completely new job title reality TV star. Since its premiere in 1992, we have seen 33 more seasons of the real world. Plus spinoffs and challenges, and spinoffs of the Challenges. And beyond the real world, we've seen documentary style, reality shows, sitcom style, reality shows, competition style.

You know, the real world, which was a grand experiment. At the time, there was no such thing as...nobody called it reality television. That wasn't a term that had been coined yet, nor unscripted. I think we referred to it and the producers referred to it as a docu-soap, and that's how we positioned it.

Like the business model of early MTV itself, the solution was so simple you sort of can't imagine how nobody thought of it sooner. Writers and actors and sets are expensive, Mary Els Buenim and her partner Jonathan Murray said. Why not ditch the writers and the actors and the sets? Why not find some real young people, like regular everyday young people, but hot, and follow those hot, young, regular people around with cameras and see what happens? So they made a pilot.

I was in the pilot, it was a fluke, it was weird. I was in the creative services group and kind of just filing papers and not very challenged and feeling like, maybe MTV isn't where I belong.

That's eventual Video Music Awards head writer Tracy Grandstaff. At the time, she was working at MTV like she had dreamed of, but she was in a menial position like nobody dreams of. And then, like Ace of Base would do. Just a few years later, she saw the sign.

Hilariously, when the producers of shows like this were trying to cast something or needed an audience, they'd just in the pantries. Post information with an extension number that you could call. And this one happened to say. Looking for people between, I think, 19 and 21, willing to go on camera and just be themselves and live together for a weekend. And a friend told me to try it, she's like, Yeah, go see what it's all about. So for whatever reason, I got picked.

The pilot was a proof of concept. A long weekend in Soho for everybody now, seven strangers picked to live in a loft.

It was a really eclectic group of people. There was a bass player. I think his name was Izzy. Izzy was kind of like a cool beastie boy type vibe. Adam was a rock and roller. Amy was the youngest, she was 18..

The pilot had the mix of personalities that make a show like this work. But Bunim and Murray seemed to understand the secret to reality television success, an element that is crucial to the genre to this very day. Psychological warfare.

All of us were having breakdowns because you weren't sleeping. You're drinking, you're out on the streets, they're following you everywhere every two minutes, they're pulling you out to change the batteries in your audio pack. You didn't know if anything was planted.

Even in the pilot for the real world, the storylines had to be manipulated.

And then the big twist was, I guess in casting, there was a guy who was a little bit older that they wanted to include. So they asked if I'd be willing to go on a blind date with this guy during the taping, which I did, and he was a very sweet British guy. But little did I know that they were trying to play up. Like, Peter and I had a thing going on and that this guy and I had a thing going on. And the producer asked us to kiss at the end of the blind date, and then they play into Peter being jealous during one of the interviews.

So by now, you know, the pilot gets picked up. Bewn and Murray and MTV start from scratch with seven brand new strangers. This is the true story.

True story Seven strangers pick to live in a loft and have their lives taped to find out what happens.

When people stop being polite and start getting real.

The real world.

Eric, the model, Julie the Dancer, Heather B.

Once, MTV saw that, they could have success with the real world, which again free labor. You're getting camera ready, kids, I mean, these days every kid is camera ready, but you're getting young, uninhibited people, which are the lifeblood of MTV, to appear on your network for free. Just because they can live in a cool loft that doesn't cost much.

Even as someone who's watched season one countless times, I can't say any specific story lines jump out at me now. There are moments Heather teaching Julie some hip hop slang, and Julie misusing Skeezer. Kevin being gone a lot, and the other six roommates pulling personalities out of a bowl to surprise him with. When he got back, I remember the girls getting a trip to Jamaica. Sort of all of these play in my head, like vignettes, like memories from college, like real life memories, in that they don't neatly tell stories for the viewers. The people on the screen, in the real world, felt like us, which meant that we could be them.

You know, I think that we were all intrigued, also being narcissistic college kids at the time. I think we all felt like, Oh, maybe we could all be on this show too. I think it opened up the possibility for us of imagining ourselves and our lives, being interesting enough to document in a series.

Doug Herzog saw something important in the show's success.

We realized as much as our audience loves big stars and music stars and the glitz of music video, they really like watching themselves even more. And I think you can draw a straight line from, say, the real world to social media, you know, to even Instagram specifically. Look at me.

Once the real world blew up, a second season was a foregone conclusion, and real question became, How do you do it again? Buhnen, Murray and MTV were very close to filming again with the original cast. But ultimately they decided to wipe the slate clean and start with seven all new strangers. Doug Herzog was skeptical.

I'm the idiot who thought it would only work once because I thought, well, the next time you do this. These kids are going to come in with all these expectations and they're going to be acting out and they're going to be over the top. And they're going to be absolutely insufferable. Trying to get camera time and no one's going to want to watch. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong because they acted out, they were over the top, they were insufferable, they were trying to get camera time and everybody wanted to watch for 25 years.

So Doug was wrong, the formula kept working, but Doug was also 100 right. In that subsequent real world. Cast members were more savvy, they were in many cases insufferable. Puck obviously comes to mind, but let's not sleep on Flora or Bethesda or Sean. I'm getting off topic and I know that.

Once they had the season in Los Angeles, and I was still in college, and I remember getting into it and there was Beth, the lesbian, you know? It was also like a place where, as a new queer person, the real world was one of those soft landing spots for me of seeing queer people on TV and on screen. And being quote unquote real. And that was important to me and to my group of LGBT friends.

Go back and watch some of those early seasons of the real world. You'll notice that you're seeing some of the first honest, three-dimensional, queer human beings in television history. Norman in season one, Beth in season two, Pedro in season three, also being the first honest three-dimensional human being. With AIDS a lot of people ever encountered, you'll notice that, what a lot of Kevin says in Season one about the experience for people who are Black and male in 1992, much of which his non-black and non-male housemates reject, is about 30 years ahead of the mainstream national conversation on that subject.

I posted a couple of pictures on Facebook from a summer camp that I went to and people wanted to know why. No one in the picture was smiling. And again, how do you explain this to kids? I mean, maybe I was just at an unhappy summer camp. But I think the answer is people weren't performing for cameras. If you stood in front of a camera, it was something that didn't happen that often. So you should look serious, right?

As the real world blew up, MTV did what MTV does, which is show it over and over and over. Reruns at night, marathons on the weekends, wall-to-wall, seven strangers picked to live in a loft. It may have taken a year or two for the original five VJs to become celebrities, but the cast of the real world were white-hot famous in a flash.

Those first seven kids that came in, they didn't know what to expect, nor did we. We had no idea what was going to happen. And they turned into stars. Well, maybe stars are wrong, but they turned into Andy Warhol 15-minute celebrities.

But I think Doug was right the first time. They may have been on TV for 15 minutes, but the fame and its effects on them lasted for decades. We'll talk to some of the people who lived it after this.

Hey, I'm Rhett and I'm link, maybe you know us from our daily YouTube show Good Mythical Morning. But this is a little trailer for our podcast, Ear Biscuits, where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time. And nothing is off limits.

At the start of the 1990s, Eric Neese was living in his native New Jersey. Kind of coasting, and I don't think he'd mind me saying this, but you've seen the guy, Eric Neese is simply too hot to coast.

He's been a good friend of ours. Our family became one of the top male models in the world, and he had endless connections in that world. And introduced me to a woman who was a talent scout, model scout for Bruce Weber. And he said, Get in shape, get shredded and let's take some photos and I'll bring them to the agency. And I think that you could make some money.

Bruce Weber is a photographer. He did that first big Calvin Klein underwear ad in the early 1980s, with the guy leaning against a wall in just his briefs. He did a lot of those early Abercrombie, Fitch catalogs and shopping bags. Eric was featured in Bruce Weber's Bear Pond, a book of tasteful male nudes. After which, MTV called him in for an audition, an audition to replace downtown Julie Brown as the host of Club MTV. And he got that job.

They just talk to you and ask you questions about your life, you know what you were interested in, what you were passionate about. They were looking for a model, somebody who was interested in getting into acting, getting into the entertainment industry, and I fit that character.

So Eric moves into the loft 565, Broadway. He's the first one there and his experience is real.

It was the epitome of authentic television, you know, because we had no reference. There was nothing that we were accustomed to on television that was like that. And we weren't in our minds thinking, Oh, what should I say here? or what should I do here? How is this going to come off on television?

And sometimes the things that were happening in the loft were nothing, there was no rule. That said, the cast had to hang out and film in that first season, so sometimes they just didn't.

There were time periods where there was nobody in the loft and they had to actually call us back in and say, Hey, we're filming a TV show here. We need you here in the loft. And so it kind of forced us to interact with each other, but there was a magic in that.

The show airs, and immediately Eric becomes an unprecedented mix of super famous and instantly approachable.

Oh my God, and it was crazy, just wild and crazy. Overnight, you become famous for who you really are, and so people are coming up to you as if they know you.

Eric is arguably the breakout star of what is suddenly MTV's biggest show. And like almost nobody who came after, he was able to parlay his fame into some big opportunities. MTV decides that maybe there's some life in Club MTV, after all, Eric gets that job.

You know, the real world was one kind of fame, but the grind took it to a whole other level. Because now you're talking about music, you're talking about the biggest musicians in the world performing on the show. You've got 30 kids, everybody's half naked, you know, it's sexual.

Eric's gotten famous for being himself, and then even more famous for doing what he would naturally be doing, which is just kind of being charismatic. But there are no lines to learn like an actor would have no practices or games to show up for. Like an athlete, he's sort of back to coasting, except this time he's got a lot more money and attention.

I was so self-destructive at that point. I mean, I was wild, you know, I was drinking, I was partying, I was burning the candle at both ends.

Eric is famous the way the original MTV VJs got famous, but where they had each other. He's pretty much alone, he's working more than his castmates, which creates a little bit of tension. He's projecting a happy image, but inside he's falling apart.

It was like, so divinely orchestrated and set up in the perfect way for me to really see myself like, Oh, this is who you are. Look at, you, look at how you're acting in these situations with these people. And I didn't like what I saw.

As a person who was a 90s famous reality person, you kind of were on your own in figuring out what these things mean for your existence.

That's Melissa Beck. She was one of the seven strangers on Season 9 The Real World New Orleans in 2000. And even though eight years and eight casts full of potential role models had gone before her, she still came out of the experience feeling lost.

Kids these days got it made. I can explain to a YouTuber what's going to happen when you fall off, I can explain that to you, I can tell you exactly and what you need to do to get healthy and get okay. If you're going to make these choices, that are going to affect your day-to-day life. At least have a plan with how you are going to make your life comfortable financially. So that you can zip in and out of this persona that you've created when you have to go back into your quote real world.

We are paid to just be ourselves. And it's not just being yourself, but it's also being interviewed about your opinions and feelings on everyone else around you. And let me tell you, that does not exist in the actual real world.

That is Sarah Rice. She was in the cast of Season 21 The Real World, Brooklyn in 2009..

Nobody cares if your coworker is sleeping in real late, and definitely nobody cares about your opinion on anybody else or what anybody else is doing. So I see a lot of people leave reality TV with a feeling like that opinion. And them caring about whatever is going to be able to be monetized and turned into another career. And then when they are met with the reality, that guess what, nobody really cares about what you have to say.

There was no language for the kind of mental health support a reality TV star would need. Not after Melissa's season ended in 2000, not after Sarah's ended in 2009. There was no real career path to follow, no awareness of the ways that reality fame can warp your self-perception.

This manager came into my world who really preyed upon me, had no idea what I was doing. I didn't understand the world that I was in, and this guy took advantage of me in many ways, stole $350,000 from me.

Eric made some pretty big changes.

About 16 years ago, I went into the desert to do a very long fast. I set out to do a 40 day water fast, just like Jesus and Buddha did. And a friend of mine had a ranch in the desert. I got to day 16 of just drinking water, but I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't do it correctly.

Now, what he's talking about doesn't just mean mushrooms and ayahuasca and toad, venom and all that stuff. But it does partially mean that Eric seems happy, fulfilled, healthy. When we get back, we'll talk to Melissa from The Real World New Orleans and Sarah from The Real World Brooklyn, about the evolution of that new species. The modern American reality star.

I watched every season of that show until I was on that Motherfucker.

Melissa Beck was a fan of the real world before she was a person on the real world with fans of her own.

I always feel like kind of corny saying it out loud as a person that participated on it. But that shit was special and important and like, genuinely cool. In a way that I don't know that people think that it is that now, you know, there's kind of been like a tainted vibe to it. But if you were there in the nineties, it was groundbreaking and it was really cool and special.

I was hooked on it in the nineties, too, and I can tell you, once the formula for the real world was set. As a fan, you waited for a new cast announcement, like you were watching the Chimney in Vatican City. When MTV announced a new real world cast. It was like Chevrolet announcing a new fleet of cars.

So we were less individual and more a representation of whatever you're. 2000 was, so mine was year 2000. That's why I bring that up. And of course, you know, you can then, you know, extrapolate each person and be like, Okay, that's the black guy, that's the Frat guy.

We weren't a big hookup, drama, relationship, wild drinking night kind of cast.

Sarah Rice was a cast member on Season 21.

We were all like advocates of some kind, you know? We had people who were there working for LGBTQ rights, we had people there who were being outspoken politically. Somebody who had just come back from the war in Iraq. I was on there and shared my story of being a survivor of child sexual assault. You know, we were all like fighting for something and had a lot to say.

But the action, even if it was a low drama house, was being captured and edited and broadcast to the world. And viewers who had never met Sarah were making up their minds about Sarah. And by 2009, there's such a thing as social media.

We are who we are, love us or hate us. And there are going to be people who watch us on the show and people who identify with us and are on our side. And they're going to be people who watch us and don't like this. And when I hear, Oh my gosh, Sarah from the real world, she's the worst, that's me.

And that's like, hard to explain to the outside person who's listening to you ramble on about it. You know, there's a feeling that you get where they're like, it's really not that serious. And you're like, I know this is a lot of fame, but you didn't live it.

Reality fame does affect your life like any kind of fame, but it's unlike any kind of fame in that. At least in the 1990s and the Aughts, it didn't come with the money. That can make the harder parts of fame easier to deal with.

It's just the fame, and to have just the fame, but a dwindling fame coming off of an extreme high. You know, like you felt great. People were in the streets like, I love you, I loved it when you did that, or I hated when you did that. Why'd you throw that chair?

So you have a choice. Do you keep trying to hold on to this level of fame? And if you do try and it doesn't pan out, does that mean you failed?

So, say, I got off the show when I'm 21, 22, when I'm 25. If things aren't going my way after I've gone on, you know, a whole host of auditions. Yeah, I'm in a space where I'm like, dang, I didn't really play that, right? But then, you know, you get 30 and you have kids, and you have a mortgage, and you have a husband, and you kind of like your long island, suburban life.

After the real world, New Orleans and a couple of years in Los Angeles, Melissa met a guy named Justin Beck, Justin's the lead singer for the straight edge hardcore band Glass Jaw. Melissa and Justin got married. They had a couple of daughters. Melissa works with Justin's merchandise company, Merch Direct, and a few years ago, selling some of that Merch. Melissa found herself among the reality stars who came in her wake at Bravo Con.

My husband did the merch for Bravo, so like I was there in a working capacity. I'm like slinging shirts, you know? But it also is very fascinating because I'm an outsider looking in. But I'm also like, Wow, I am part of this genre that was created. But here is where it is now. And that could not have existed the way that it does now, unless we did what we did back then. But, like, the celebrity now versus the celebrity then is like the same, except like on steroids. And the individual persona can now monetize where before. It truly was just a gift to be on MTV.

I should say, while we were recording this episode, Melissa's season of The Real World went up on Netflix. You can stream the whole thing there. She and her cast mates get no money from it.

You know, therapist didn't have a lot of answers for that, nor experience watching reality television, which I think is a big problem. And what I'm very passionate about now is getting that mental health support to people who are on reality television shows. Because that is one thing that I do think, that they were really missing when I was on the show. And I see a few changes being made, but not enough.

They're going to need to come up with a certain kind of therapy or a person who is experienced and understands this thing. So that when they have clients who are going to be coming out of this reality bubble, they'll have words and terms for these feelings, which aren't bad, they're just feelings that exist.

Things are changing, but they're changing slowly, and probably for the rest of their lives. Melissa and Sarah and Eric will have someone come up to them and remind them of something they did when they were 22. Treat them like a character on a show, someone who's frozen in time, regardless of how much they've evolved since then. And maybe it won't happen every day like it used to, but it'll happen every week, for sure, and then maybe every other week. But it won't stop. That's the nature of this thing. So I have to ask, if you had your life to live over, would you do it again?

100, and I say all this from a healthy place. It was an opportunity that brought me so much life experience and so much exposure to shit I would have never seen before, so much perspective. I would not have had I not done it. All the people at MTV, they changed my life in such a way. Where, you know, I could be in a cute little townhouse in Tampa, going to my happy hour and, you know, punching in decorating my cubicle.

Let's get back to Eric. His psychedelic journeys and healing work have given him serenity and forgiveness and purpose. And, believe me, when I tell you this absolutely glowing skin. But they've also given him a vision of the future, a hopeful glimpse into what a young Eric or Melissa or Sarah might be able to expect.

The spirit of ayahuasca and the spirits that I work with were actually communicating or talking to me about my life, my path, my mission and what I came here to do. And they started talking about the real world, and they started talking about reality TV. And they said, you know how? You were a part of that show that changed the face of television 30 years ago. And they were like, Well, guess what?

Time will tell whether reality television will actually become a catalyst for positive societal change. I hope so. My heart can't take another scandal fall. But in the meantime, Doug Herzog was right you can draw a line from the real world to social media.