Tales of The SoHo Seven

By Richard Zoglin

SHOW: THE REAL WORLD

TIME: BEGINNING MAY 21, 10 P.M. EDT, MTV

THE BOTTOM LINE: Good idea, middling execution, in this '90s update of An American Family.

Julie and Eric are starting to have, like, a thing for each other. Not a romance exactly; sort of a badgering flirtation. She lets him eat off her plate of spaghetti. He goes to her hip-hop dance class. When Becky, one of five other roommates, wants to fix Julie up with a blind date, Eric is dismayed. "He gave me this look," says Becky. "I thought fire was going to shoot out of his eyes."

Then there's the strawberries incident. Eric complains at the breakfast table that Julie crept into his bed at 6:30 one morning and asked if he wanted to go out for strawberries and pancakes. She protests: She didn't say anything about pancakes, and anyway it was an innocent gesture. "He makes it sound like I just climbed all into bed with him and lay there a while and said, 'Let's go get strawberries,' " she says later. "Wrongola!"

Just a slice of life from the real world. Make that The Real World, MTV's new 13-week documentary series that puts a '90s spin on An American Family, PBS's 1973 cinema-verite chronicle of the troubled Loud family. The producers selected seven young New Yorkers (one a transplant from Alabama) ranging in age from 19 to 25, put them together in a furnished loft in SoHo and set the cameras rolling for three months. The idea was to keep a video diary of their interactions, altercations and (possibly) romantic entanglements -- to see, as the show puts it, "what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real."

Great idea, middling execution. The group is composed entirely of aspiring artistes: a writer, a rap singer, a dancer, a model and so forth (not a 9-to-5 drudge in the house). The half-hour episodes are assembled with quick-cutting flash by producers Mary Ellis Bunim and Jon Murray. Few scenes last longer than a minute, the sound track vibrates with rock music, and the camera is always moving or tilted rakishly. MTV has apparently outlawed the 90 degrees angle.

All this rock-video frenzy prevents us from getting much of a sustained look at how the characters relate to one another. The camera spends too much time outside the loft -- watching Julie navigate the subway on her way to a dance class, or Heather at a rap recording session. The show seems less interested in its rats-in-a-cage sociological experiment than in fashioning a Fame-like documentary on Making It in New York. The glimpses we do get of group interaction are -- in the first three episodes, at least -- pretty paltry. Becky has promised Andre that she will go see his rock band perform, but she is too tired after attending an art show with Norman. Heather, out with Julie walking Norman's Great Dane, is angry when the dog knocks her to the pavement. "I wanted to kill Julie, the dog, Norman," she says later. "I woulda just blown up the whole house, the way I felt that day."

The Real World may improve as the subjects get used to the camera and fed up with one another. With a little more psychic turmoil, the show might even become a hit. Imagine the possibilities: young viewers turn off Beverly Hills, 90210 for Tales of the SoHo Seven. The gang gets back together for a sequel. There's a reunion after seven years, then 14, then 21 . . . Come on, Julie, go for those strawberries.