Remember when you were in high school and your days were filled with Grey Goose-fueled parties, shopping for designer clothing and movie-like romances. You don’t? That’s because you probably didn’t grow up in MTV reality land, where the most complicated times of anyone’s life can be boiled down into tightly edited and curiously resolved 30-minute chunks.
More fake high school: The Paper
Remember when you were in high school and your days were filled with Grey Goose-fueled parties, shopping for designer clothing and movie-like romances.
You don’t? That’s because you probably didn’t grow up in MTV reality land, where the most complicated times of anyone’s life can be boiled down into tightly edited and curiously resolved 30-minute chunks.
The Paper, a brand-new “reality” show from MTV, fits neatly into the “fake high school rich kids” reality genre the channel has perfected, but unlike the vomit-inducing The Hills or the snooze-fest True Life, it’s really not that bad.
Like most other reality shows, The Paper is shit, but it’s shit you and your friends can watch together, laugh at and even quote later. Only one episode has aired, but judging from the awesomeness of the “this season on The Paper” montage, we can expect the sort of addictive, cringe-inducing reality TV that hasn’t existed since The Pick Up Artist aired last summer.
The show follows the uber-hormonal staff of The Circuit, a newspaper based out of Cypress Bay High School in Florida. The Circuit is constantly referred to as an “award-winning” paper, but in the newspaper business, finding an award-winning publication is like finding a glaring error in the Willamette Week. They’re everywhere. (Coincidentally, the Week is also an award-winning newspaper.)
Does The Paper accurately present what crafting a newspaper is really like? It’s impossible to tell. Like most reality shows, the real focus of the program isn’t what the characters do, it’s about how awful they act while doing it. And oh boy, are these kids horrible.
The first episode presents the trials of a few standout employees of The Circuit, all vying to be chosen by their stressed-out adviser as editor-in-chief (annoyingly referred to as “In-Chief” by the staff) for the next school year. There’s Giana and Trevor, the newsroom couple who are always awkwardly groping each other; Adam, the neurotic business manager who is always one step away from screaming “Oh…my…god!” in his best valley-girl accent; and many more. And then there is Amanda, who kicks off the first episode with this gem of a quote: “Journalists are the most important part of the world.” You said it, sister.
Amanda is the paper’s copy editor and front-runner to be “In-chief” because of her tenacity and seemingly hardworking attitude, which the staff rightfully sees as calculating and controlling. The show chooses to focus mostly on Amanda, and at the end of the first episode, we aren’t surprised to find out that she is chosen to serve as editor.
This is (of course) much to the dismay of her future staff, who proceed to throw amazing high school freak-outs in the hall after they find out the news, hissing unrelenting insults behind Amanda’s back. It would be easy to feel bad for her if she wasn’t such an annoying know-it-all.
Like The Hills, I don’t trust parts of the show. It seems a little too cleanly edited, and the camera is always in the right place at the right time, such as when (in the show’s best scene, mind you) a staff member of the paper cruelly insults Amanda while she sits a few feet behind him listening intently to every word.
What sets The Paper apart from The Hills and other beautiful-people-doing-stupid-things reality shows is that the cast seem like real high schoolers, with real zits and real hormone imbalances.
Still, whatever engaging realness is thrown into The Paper, there are those patented MTV flourishes that threaten to ruin it. Case in point: the final scene of the first episode, which shows Amanda taking on the world after receiving her new post. The music swells and she stands alone in a courtyard as the camera swivels around her for what seems like an eternity.
It would be laughable if it weren’t meant to be inspiring. All it inspired me to do was turn off my TV.
Let’s hope the show doesn’t completely give in to the MTV syndrome of constructing reality, and instead gives us what we really want: high school kids acting like idiots so that we may laugh at them and pretend we didn’t act the same way when we were 16.
The Paper MTVMondays at 10:30 p.m.
