MTV's True Life

...A show in which young people make terrible choices.

This, of course, from a network specializing in shows about young people making terrible choices. Every show on MTV, good or bad, mostly bad, glamorizes generational narcissism. The Hills is rich kids living a glitzed up but still somehow dreary version of the typical suburban over-privileged white kid lifestyle. The Real World is your six or seven least-favorite self-absorbed douchebags shipped off to a familiar-yet-exotic locale to film an improvised Sartre play. The Tila Tequila brand features... sadness. Just sadness.

What sets True Life apart is that it abandons most pretense of glamorizing its subject. It genuinely takes a documentary approach. Each episode explores a single theme or experience of a refreshingly broad, racially, socially and economically cross-section of people 16-22. E.g. love triangles, long distance relationships, compulsive behavior, drug abuse, emotional traumas, graduations, marriage. What unites all of the episodes is that these people uniformly make terrible choices.

With a couple years of curmudgeonly distance between that demographic and myself, I feel confident in judging the people making the choices. Oh, the smug grin that spreads across my face as I witness slow-motion trainwrecks.

Beyond that, though, each story possesses a strange gravity. I want to know what happens to these people later on. The worst thing is when it looks like someone has their life back on the tracks then the coda comes on, written in black-and-white. He relapsed. She went back to the abusive boyfriend.

Not all the episodes end that bad. Sometimes there's a happy ending. Mostly, nothing changes. Life goes on, with the people stuck in the same rut.

So, the point of all this, if I have one is: What are the producers of True Life trying to say? Its a documentaty, right, but this is MTV. I can't shake the feeling that I'm being sold something, some lifestyle, some cultural product because I'm hanging on the margins of a valuable demographic. Yet, improbably, True Life exists above it all, unadulterated.