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‘The Real World’: Worst job ever!

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Underprivileged kids of Sydney beware: The Real World is heading your way. In past editions of The Real World, the roommates are forced to ‘work’ at one task or another, presumably to prevent all of them from cocooning and getting cirrhosis during filming.

In Las Vegas, they worked for the Palms Casino (as, among other things, go-go dancers); in Chicago they planned activities for the city’s park district. In the current round, in Denver, the seven have been forced to fake a Rocky Mountain High by interning for Outward Bound.

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In theory, it’s a good idea: the abysmally self-centered roommates have to focus on mentoring poor kids -- and they get to wear skimpy clothes!

But it has been obvious from the first episode that the roommates have zero interest in the outdoors, zero interest in non-jacuzzi-related physical activity and zero interest in camping anywhere other than at the local bar. They’ve ditched out of training, made whining calls to their Outward Bound coordinator, and generally made a mess of the whole endeavor.

In the past two episodes, however, they’ve had to take care of actual kids -- a group of boys from New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina. It was time to set aside the petulance, and while the seven acted less bratty than usual, the entire enterprise required no cohesion among the roommates to complete the job.

They barely beat the kids -- who were arriving from the airport -- to set up the campsite. Stephen bailed for his sister’s wedding in the middle of the camping trip, which is understandable, but his absence was treated as more of a sin than the abominable training session in a previous week when half the Denver crew faked illness to get out of training.

While it was touching to see one of the kids break down in tears at the final campfire, not enough time was spent with any of the Outward Bound campers to get any sense of personality and growth. Presenting a group of underprivileged kids as just a mass of interchangeable faces is actually a little insulting, and does nothing to show the roommates getting perspective on their comparatively fortunate -- if camera-obsessed -- position.

In the first international edition -- in London in 1995 -- the roomies were unable to get jobs because of work permit regulations. One can only hope similar restrictions take place in the next season, in Australia. The work concept needs to be just that -- work, and something of a journey -- in order for viewers to gain any sort of satisfaction from it.

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