THEIR SO-CALLED LIVES

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Six years ago, MTV made the uncharacteristic move of approaching two television producers significantly past the age of 25 to concoct a nighttime soap opera. What partners Mary-Ellis Bunim (a veteran of Search for Tomorrow and As the World Turns) and Jon Murray, both in their 40s, came up with -- The Real World -- was a hip complement to the channel's usual diet of music videos. Now in its fourth season, the documentary series follows the lives of six or seven carefully chosen young strangers, brought together to live for several months in a home seemingly decorated from a Pottery Barn catalog. The cast members and locales change each year, but the formula doesn't. The producers assemble distinctive and contrasting personalities -- the current season, set in London, pits Neil, a bookish, anti-American Brit, against Mike, a McDonald's-loving Missouri jock -- and then wait for the inevitable clashes.

For all its fly-on-the-wall realism, The Real World has drawn criticism for being too artificial and contrived. Indeed, the show employs a story department -- a team of three writers who outline a plot for each week's 22-min. episode, culled from hundreds of hours of filmed footage. "We storyboard each scene," says Bunim, "just like in a prime-time series." Notes Murray: "This isn't Frederick Wiseman, where you're going to get a long, incoherent documentary with way more than you want to see."

Yet The Real World is addictive television, and it has become MTV's top-rated series. The success of the show has given rise to another Murray-Bunim creation, Road Rules, which premiered on MTV last week and will air on Monday nights throughout the summer. This series follows another group of carefully selected young strangers, this time placed in a Winnebago and told to drive around the country looking for clues to direct them from one destination to the next. In some ways, Road Rules seems a direct response to criticisms of The Real World: though edited in the manner of its predecessor, the new show is not nearly as neatly packaged. As a result, it is not nearly as entertaining.

It suffers, first of all, from a lack of glamour. Some viewers have grown tired of seeing stylish young people on The Real World deconstruct their lives over fine coffee in well-appointed lofts. But it is preferable to watching the Road Rules ensemble tackle such messy chores as emptying the RV's latrine at a dump station. In The Real World, living groups are overloaded with preternaturally cute aspiring actors, models and musicians. The Road Rules crew is more ordinary -- five average-looking college-age men and women with no discernible show-biz goals -- but also less captivating. Kit, an energetic Georgia party girl, is the most appealing of the quintet, but none has a personality that overwhelms.

Moreover, the sexual tension that always heats up The Real World is only lukewarm on Road Rules. On this season's The Real World, for instance, we are witnessing every titillating moment of the flirtation between Neil, a cynical doctoral candidate, and Kat, a bubbly anthropology student. On Road Rules, Carlos (or Los as he prefers to be called), a Howard University student, clearly has a crush on Shelly, a Native American teenager. But when he tries to kiss her, the audience only gets to hear them talk about it later. Kit, after watching herself and the others in the series' first episode, said she was "really surprised by how much the attraction between Los and Shelly was downplayed."

Other participants too have been dissatisfied with the reality-TV versions of their lives. Kat, from The Real World, has complained in published reports that her relationship with Neil has been overdramatized. Meanwhile, Mike, who is regularly shown singing the praises of football and ranch dressing, has contended that his crass side has been too magnified. Murray and Bunim reply that the kids are having a natural reaction to seeing their lives on film. "We condense reality, but we don't distort it," says Murray. "The basic truth of what happens to these people is onscreen."

More of this TV truth is on the way. Murray and Bunim are trying to decide where to set the fifth installment of The Real World, and they may do a second Road Rules series, possibly in Europe. The team is attracting emulators as well. Next week the Disney Channel will launch a 10-part documentary series, Hollywood Lives, which follows a dozen good-looking teenagers who are pursuing entertainment careers. For Generation X, reality doesn't always bite; it just keeps getting knocked off.