Increasingly, it feels like more and more TV shows and movies are made for people who only know how to approach real life via the filter of movies and TV shows. I mean, I'm not immune to this. There have been a number of times in my own life where I've jokingly said things were just like a TV show or where I've acted as though my life were guided by television gods. But there's this whole race of shows out there now that feels specifically constructed for people who've watched lots of TV and know all of the tropes. I like some of these shows - Community comes to mind - but unless a show's creator has a firm handle on his show's tone (as Community creator Dan Harmon does), it's too easy to have all of this disappear into a meaningless void, a place where literally everything is covered up by an affectless sneer.
Enter MTV's new foray into scripted programming, The Hard Times of RJ Berger. It is a show that is literally without a premise. I mean, there's an attempt to present this as a premise: RJ has a big penis, and then everyone in school finds out about it. But it's not immediately clear how this creates conflict or puts characters into new contexts or anything like that. It's simply the way to open up your raunchy teen sex comedy movie in which RJ Berger's penis is revealed to his high school's cognoscenti, and then he has sex with lots of hot girls, and he finally realizes that the girl who was his best friend all along was the girl for him because she really understands him. Unfortunately, this isn't the opening of a raunchy teen sex comedy movie. It's the pilot of a raunchy teen sex comedy TV series, but the pilot has made basically no effort to distinguish itself from the first 20 minutes of a movie. Worse, what the series has to say about high school seems to be almost entirely, "Man, high school movies and TV shows sure are fun to watch, aren't they?"
Now, obviously, this series could grow from this initial episode. Of all of the popular, well-worn TV genres, the teen soap seems to be the most likely to turn into something surprisingly different from its pilot given enough time. Dawson's Creek started out with a hammy, way-too-earnest pilot and ended up a show where buildings blew up. The O.C. started out with an ironic sneer and gradually pulled back the mask to reveal a heart beneath that sneer (before sending it back behind the mask for much of the show's middle two seasons). Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggested that high school problems were just like monsters, tee hee, and ended up being a show about how the process of growing up completely fucks you up. And so on.
