New Forced Perspective and "The Paper"

My boss was on vacation last week, and you know what that means: New Forced Perspective!

But the real issue of the day, aside from the fact that Hillary Clinton is apparently about to make the entire Democratic party look like Florida circa November 2000 (Floridation?), is "The Paper."What is one to make of a reality show about a newspaper these days? On MTV, no less?

I stopped watching MTV a few years back after I realized that they run at least three distinct cable stations and none of them actually play music, but this show lured me back. I was prepared to be scandalized, but even I have to admit that it's one of the best "reality" shows since the early "Real Worlds."

The show is just what it sounds like: a quasi-documentary that follows a group of high school journalism students and their teacher. Of course there's manufactured drama and heavy-handed characterization of kids who probably aren't actually walking stereotypes in real life. And you'd better believe a team of professional gag writers is feeding the cast lines just as fast as they can write them. But so what? If you like your documentary raw, MTV probably shouldn't be your first stop anyway.

What stands out is that, for the first time, a reality show is bringing people I actually recognize to the dance. With a few exceptions, the kids actually seem like j-students. They bicker about punctuation and leading. They bitch constantly and plot mutiny against their editor. Surprisingly for a mainstream show, they apparently play beer pong while they should be working. And, most genuinely, they talk a big game in public, briefly plunge into hysterical insecurity when no one's looking, and then pull it all together just in time for deadline.

All real, solid stuff. Even when the kids are clearly using canned material, they don't look or act like the models that miraculously seem to appear on every other "reality" show -- they seem like kids who spend a lot of time indoors, struggling with telephones and computers and thinking of ways to be clever. Heck, the team's outgoing editor-in-chief, a pushy brunette who makes a cameo in the pilot episode, could be working at the RGJ as we speak. It's that realistic.

Plus, I just can't hate a show about journalism that rolls out Queen's "Under Pressure" within the first 10 minutes of the series. If MTV makes newspapers cool again, I may need to take back some of those things I said after they canceled "Sifl and Oly."