If they can make it there, they can make MTV

New York is a puzzle to be solved, or be defeated by. So it goes on “The City” and “The Real World: Brooklyn,” both of which have recently premiered on MTV, a network that for years never thought to present itself as anything but an insider. With these new shows, though, both extensions of reliable brands, it’s as if the network is throwing up its hands in defeat, acknowledging that it can’t quite keep up as it used to.

“The City” is the spinoff of the Los Angeles-based “The Hills,” and it revolves around the warp-speed immersion of Whitney Port -- Lauren Conrad’s former tag-along on “The Hills” -- into New York’s often overlapping worlds of fashion and romance. “The City” has less in common with its materfamilias show than with the keenest and most doggedly faithful representation of New York class struggle since the original “Real World,” “Gossip Girl.”

Here, as on “Gossip Girl,” there are rich kids, and there are hipsters, but the secret is that both groups are strivers, which means that a blank slate like Whitney could theoretically fit anywhere. And so she tries, or is molded to try: Whitney often seems like an alien gamely trying to learn New York life -- American life, human life -- on the fly. Her lake-size eyes rarely telegraph anything other than curiosity. Her vocal patterns begin and end at surprise. Sometimes it seems like she knows only a few key phrases, and her entire patter consists of different jumbles of them.

Turns out in New York, the only currency is “who you know.” In the series premiere, after Whitney’s first date with Jay, the Australian rocker with commitment issues and no apparent means of income (apart from appearing on the show), she told her friend Erin, “He took me to this place where he kinda like knew everybody there,” as if that made the food taste better. But by the second episode she was already flaunting her own access, telling Jay, who she believes has cheated on her, “As much as I’m new here and as much as you may not think I know people here, I’m not that naive.”

To Whitney’s credit, she moves through the city with an equine grace that wasn’t always evident on “The Hills” from behind her desk at Teen Vogue, and her footwear collection makes Carrie Bradshaw’s look pedestrian (though it’s odd that she’d never owned a pair of Manolo Blahniks until this season’s second episode).

But still, the beta shall never be alpha, which we are reminded of by the presence of Whitney’s co-worker Olivia Palermo, a flawless-skinned society arriviste who, a couple of years ago, was a regular feature on, and sometime punching bag of, society blogs like Socialite Rank (now defunct) and Park Avenue Peerage.

At work, Olivia always looks wounded when Whitney gets a compliment, like an older sibling resenting a parent’s doting on a baby, except that Olivia is only there, of course, to be a reliable generator of such looks. Did she not watch the last season of “The Hills,” in which Whitney’s skill at sending models down a runway and attracting cameras left other, non-MTV-deal-having employees perpetually sour-faced?

“She has to be the confident New Yorker now, not the L.A. girl,” Olivia says of Whitney to her cousin Nevan, himself a great New York archetype: the slacker, nogoodnik son of an art dealer (the New York Post recently uncovered a 2007 arrest for solicitation in Miami). Nevan replies, without any apparent irony, “In this town she’ll learn very fast they are cutthroat, they are evil, and who knows it better than you?” There was just the faintest twitch of Olivia’s cheek before she managed to hold her lips pursed, pensive, controlled. Olivia needs to belong too, so she can’t quite show that she’s hurting.

The idea that “Real World” cast members might truly fit in with the communities in which they reside seems as antiquated as the notion of music videos on television, ideals from a better time. And that MTV has placed this season’s cast members in a warehouse at the end of a pier in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, one of the most isolated in the borough, isn’t a promising initial sign.

In the season premiere, though, the cast members are given a Brooklyn crash course (uncredited on screen) by the Lordz (ne Lordz of Brooklyn), a surprisingly resilient crew of rappers and graffiti writers turned rockers who take them to Bensonhurst for pizza, to Williamsburg for a concert, to Bay Ridge to shop in the Lordz’s store, Made in Brooklyn, and to some street where they all play stickball. Really? (Those interested in this slice of throwback Brooklynalia can find stickball bats and Spalding rubber balls on the website of the Lordz’s store, and perhaps nowhere else.)

MTV has often forged odd alliances between its “Real World” casts and local figures to boost credibility. (Remember poor Becky, from the Seattle season, coerced into collaborating musically with Sir Mix-A-Lot?) But this is the first time when the show has begun with such a wholesale cosign, as if Brooklyn were so impenetrable it demanded its own tour guide (true) and so inhospitable it required an introduction (possible).

But this Brooklyn holds little attraction for the cast. Nor does their actual neighborhood. (Not even the IKEA up the block gets any real screen time.) Instead, they dutifully traipse into Manhattan to socialize and, last week, in the case of Baya, a young, pert dancer, to take classes and go on auditions. Her opportunity for assimilation comes in the form of the Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory, led by a taskmaster, Safi Thomas, who naturally scares the sense out of her, being from Salt Lake City and whatnot.

Baya is just at the outskirts of being a good dancer, and initially it appears that she’ll be rejected from the conservatory. Later in the episode, though, Safi calls and offers Baya a spot -- you can almost hear the sound of pride being swallowed. But then, in a staggering moment of independent thought, Baya tells him that she’s not interested, thank you very much. Boldly, or naively, she wants to chart a different path, and isn’t that what the city is all about?

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