TV REVIEW : ‘Real World’ as MTV Sees It: Entertaining 3rd-Year Kickoff

As far as social anthropology goes, it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. Yes, it’s time for another shotgun wedding--or shotgun melting pot--of disparate twentysomethings as the third season of MTV’s “The Real World” commences tonight.

This time, the awesomely pre-furnished apartment where seven lucky lab rats will be thrown together and peeped upon for 4 1/2 months is in San Francisco.

Will the new S.F. roommates arrive with flowers in their hair? Will bloodshed and/or lovemaking ensue, or are we just in for several months of dirty-dishes bickering? Will we wish them all dead at 21? More significantly, can “The Real World” hope to compete with the unreal world at this late date, now that “Melrose Place” has finally gotten good ‘n’ popular and proven fiction stranger than truth?

The good news--or maybe not, if you’re prone to guilt about your voyeuristic pleasures: Even with an untested crop of new kids on the Lombard Street block, the premiere is inordinately entertaining, and the follow-up episodes previewed equally so.

As before, MTV slowly introduces the quirks of the seven, bringing some of them to the pad in pairs. Cory, 20, a very suburban San Diego lass, takes the train up with Pedro, 22, a Cuban-born Floridian who has a surprise to share with her and his other new ‘mates: He has full-blown AIDS.

Elsewhere that same day, Judd, 24, a savvy aspiring cartoonist from Michigan, is taking a cab into the city with Rachel, 23, an Arizonan of Latino descent, and she has an even bigger shockeroo to spring on the gang: She’s a (you better sit down for this) Young Republican.

Also sharing the peanut butter are three S.F. residents: Pam, 26, an Asian American med student; Mohammed, 24, an African American musician and poet; and white punk Puck, 25, a perpetually scabbed bike messenger who proudly blows snot rockets, has “I don’t use utensils, ever” as his eating motto and is easily the most likely to be voted out of the apartment.

Seems like just about everything is represented here--except maybe crippling introversion. The demographic spread is artificial but perversely and educationally fun; naturally, there will be emblematic confrontations over issues of race and AIDS awareness as well as body odors, though it takes till the third episode for the first roomie to be reduced to tears.

* “The Real World” has its season premiere with two consecutive episodes beginning at 10 tonight on MTV.