MTV Series Moves North to Find a Grittier Reality

They live in a converted firehouse in this city’s most exclusive neighborhood. Their bedrooms feature sponge-painted walls, and their furniture climbed right out of House Beautiful. They are your typical urban housemates, among them a lumberjack, an aspiring archeologist and a lesbian from Mississippi who hangs out with drag queens.

This may not be the cosmos as you recognize it, but as of Wednesday, this is “The Real World.”

Not only that, but when the sixth season of MTV’s “reality-based soap opera” makes its debut, the seven young adult cast members will be equipped with the latest trendy accouterment in the worlds, some would say, of both soap operas and young adults: a sense of social purpose.

Miami’s South Beach, where the fifth “Real World” season was set, felt just too aimless and unstructured, said Mary-Ellis Bunim, co-creator and co-executive producer, with Jonathan Murray, of the series that has become required viewing for much of this country’s twentysomething TV audience. Enter Boston, home of the Puritans, land of hard winters and serious social contracts.

“Our motivation was to find the greatest contrast to South Beach Miami, where people were pretty self-involved,” said Bunim, a Massachusetts native. “We wanted to show a different side of this generation. Rather than spending the 22 weeks arguing about which club they were going to, if they came into a city with more traditional values, it would hopefully bring out a more positive example of people 18 to 25 years old.”

The “Real World” staff combed the Boston area for just the right community service opportunity. An after-school program for children 5 to 12 years old in gritty East Boston provided unpaid jobs for the cast, as well as a visual contrast for chic Beacon Hill, where the same 19th century firehouse that appeared in “Spenser: For Hire” served as home to the four young women and three young men in this season’s “Real World.”

To the delight of Bunim and Murray, who had been hoping for something resembling a dramatic arc, they soon found that voluntarism is not as easy as it looks. One cast member even managed to get fired from the after-school program, a genuine feat in the world of unpaid labor.

Again, Bunim and Murray would have had to stretch to invent this, but her dismissal provided a wake-up call to her housemates. For the rest of the series, they plunged into their work with renewed zeal, painting the after-school center, writing and producing a play with the children, organizing a basketball league and launching a journal-writing campaign.

As a gesture of redemption and repentance, the fired after-school worker found herself a new volunteer position at a shelter for homeless women.

“As usual, the reality was 10 times better than what we could have scripted,” Murray said. “They hit bottom and then ultimately pulled themselves back up.”

Also as usual, the young “Real World” cast did not necessarily see eye-to-eye with their producers. The volunteer stuff was fine, they said; it gave them something to do and helped to define their time. But the real theme of this season, said 22-year-old Montana McGlynn, who took a sabbatical from archeology studies at New York’s Hunter College to appear on the show, was “a natural progression of people living together in an intense situation. When I look at the whole thing, I see myself having developed deep and meaningful relationships with people I would have snubbed off, people like Sean, a lumberjack from a town of 3,000 in Wisconsin. I met him and I’m like, please, you have an accent.”

That lumberjack, Sean Duffy, is also a law student. At 25, Duffy is the 10th of 11 children, all raised in a home where MTV is blocked out because their mother thinks it must have something to do with drugs.

Like McGlynn, Duffy sent in his “Real World” audition tape as a lark: “If I made it, fine; if I didn’t, no big deal.” He arrived in Boston unprepared for the fact that cameras would follow him as he performed all but the most basic of bodily functions and unaware that as a straight lumberjack/law student from the Midwest, he would be one of the less exotic cast members.

“I didn’t know everybody would be so different. I went into the house for the first time and thought, ‘Oh my God, holy [bleep], this is going to be a long six months,’ ” Duffy said.

For Duffy, the lesson of this “Real World” season is that “if you have an open mind to all kinds of different situations, you can really grow as a person. Six months ago, there was no way I could ever imagine getting dressed next to a drag queen.”

The drag queen was invited to the house by Genesis Moss, 21. A college dropout from Gulfport, Miss., who “didn’t do anything but work in a gym,” Moss conceded that she filled the cast’s gay slot--and did so happily.

“I had never been in a big city before, and the freedom of the gay population just blew me away,” she said. “In Gulfport, if you hung a gay pride flag, it would be burned. My own family, it took them at least a year and a half to accept my girlfriend.”

Nineteen-year-old Kameelah, a human biology student at Stanford University, who chose not to disclose her surname, said the worst part of the experience was meeting a guy she liked in Boston and not forming a relationship with him.

“That was so awkward,” Kameelah said, revealing a giant silver stud in her tongue as she spoke. “He was really not into the whole scene, you know, just you and me and the ‘Real World’ cameras.”

But Kameelah, for one, called the team’s work at the after-school program “a saving grace, at least for me.” Fellow Californian Syrus Levonne Yarbrough--”initials SLY”--from Santa Monica echoed that opinion. “The most important theme is definitely voluntarism, and the focus on youth,” Yarbrough said. “I would have to say that as a group, we set our goals and we pretty much accomplished them.”

Tall and strapping, Yarbrough, 25, attended the University of Hawaii on a basketball scholarship. He works as a nightclub promoter and has done work as an extra on “Baywatch.” Sometimes he gives motivational speeches to students at Santa Monica High, his alma mater. He admits he fills the cast’s black heterosexual jock quotient and said he tried out for “Real World” because, “Well, doesn’t everyone want to do this?”

But the volunteer project made it all worthwhile, Yarbrough said, because he felt he was replicating the best of his own childhood experiences.

“The Santa Monica Boys’ Club is my life,” Yarbrough said. “I credit them with so very much.”

In the end, Bunim and Murray readily agree that cliches and contrivance abound in “The Real World.” Throwing seven young people together and saying, effectively, “OK, now you’re socially committed” is nobody’s definition of the way the planet actually functions, they concur.

“The whole premise of this show is contrived, we admit that,” Murray said. “But out of that contrivance, seven people who have never lived together have managed to do so. We think it makes for wonderful stories.”

* “The Real World” airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on MTV.