ON a recent afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, a production team was hunched over monitors in a converted warehouse, watching two hyperventilating young women square off on an adjacent stage, surrendering their privacy -- and risking their teeth -- for the sake of what some might call the reality generation.
The women, contestants on MTV's resuscitated unscripted series "Road Rules," played a game called Scorpion. Each player was tied to her opponent's forearm and had to use the free hand to rip nine adhesive tags from her rival's back. Unfortunately for the players, this inevitably meant plenty of sharp elbows and unintentional scratching.
"What about a mouth guard? This is [expletive] ridiculous!" fumed Kina Dean, a hyper-aggressive 23-year-old MTV reality veteran who's known for stirring up strong passions among viewers and her colleagues. Her challenger, a 22-year-old named Angel Turlington, was on the verge of tears, dissing the strapping Dean as a "freakin' transvestite."
"She just poked me in the eye," Kina shouted. "This is dangerous!"
Even allowing for the possibility that the players may have amped up their reactions a bit for the cameras, the "Road Rules" throw-down seemed a lot of agony to endure for 15 minutes or less of fame. But to these exceptionally good-looking and personable twentysomethings, it's, well, reality.
The unscripted TV craze that started 15 years ago with the premiere of MTV's "The Real World" has lasted so long that it hardly seems remarkable anymore that a small band of young people can find community and some measure of notoriety by hopping from one reality show to another. The principal cast members of "Road Rules: Viewers' Revenge," the 14th season of the show that follows a group of road-tripping young people as they compete in far-fetched challenges, are veterans of various other unscripted series and spinoffs, such as "The Real World/Road Rules Challenge"; many have spent much of the last five years living a 21st century version of the carny life, crisscrossing the nation while punching one another in the face, suffering hissy-fit meltdowns and committing other indignities on camera for the vicarious delectation of their peers.
The shows don't mirror their lives; they \o7become \f7their lives. And thus viewers may not be the only ones having trouble separating reality from overlapping layers of entertainment-industry artifice. The contestants dub themselves, with little self-consciousness, "reality kids."
