KELLEY is trying to distract a smitten CORY from the competition. PARIS falls off a balance beam. ACE wants to make out with KELLEY. “I’ve got this little triangle going on between me, CORY, and ACE,” says KELLEY, smiling into the camera. “And things are getting pretty hot.”
Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico was the fourth season of this reality show, which started airing in 2003. The first season was filmed in Florida, the second in Hawaii, and the third in Montana. A decaying fan site lists the cast members from all four seasons, linking to Myspace pages that have long ago 404ed. Group shots from each season look like PacSun ads after a diversity directive. The names form a constellation of mid-aughts suburban adolescence: Justin, Mikey, Jessica, Lauren, Christina, Jake.
This was the heyday of reality television—a relatively innocent time, before the bleak long trail of the industry had revealed itself. Reality TV had not yet created a whole new type of person, the camera-animated assemblage of silicone and pharmaceuticals; we hadn’t yet seen the way organic personalities could decay on unscripted television, their half-lives measured through sponsored laxative-tea Instagrams and paid appearances at third-tier regional clubs. In the early 2000s, the genre was still a novelty, as was the underlying idea that would drive twenty-first-century technology and culture—the idea that ordinary personhood would seamlessly readjust itself around whatever within it would sell. There was no YouTube when I signed my contract. There were no photos on phones, or video clips on social media. The Real World was on the Paris and San Diego seasons. Real World/Road Rules Challenge was airing, with its first “Battle of the Sexes” season—which Girls v. Boys approximates—in 2003. Survivor was still a novelty, and Laguna Beach was about to take over MTV.
Girls v. Boys was a low-budget production. There were four cameras total, and our two executive producers were on site at all times. Last year, I emailed one of these producers, Jessica Morgan Richter, and met up with her for a glass of wine in a dim Italian happy-hour spot in Midtown Manhattan. Jess looked just as I remembered: a wry smile, a strong nose, and slightly mournful blue eyes, a woman who could play Sarah Jessica Parker’s beleaguered younger sister in a movie. We had all loved Jess, who was much more generous to us than she needed to be. During filming, when Paris was crying, Jess would lend her her iPod to cheer her up. In the spring of 2005, she invited me, Kelley, and Krystal to come stay with her in New York City, and took us out anywhere fun that would allow sixteen-year-olds—a live Rocky Horror Picture Show, Chinatown karaoke.
In 2006, Jess left the production company behind Girls v. Boys and went to A&E, where she stayed for seven years, executive-producing Hoarders and Flipping Boston. Now she’s the VP of development at Departure Films, still focusing on reality. (“We do a lot of houses,” she said, telling me about All Star Flip, a recent special she’d produced with Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade.) Girls v. Boys was the first show Jess ever worked on; she was hired for the season before us, in Montana. As she and I stacked our coats on a barstool, she reminded me that she had been the same age then that I was now.
Jess had cast the whole show herself, starting the search in August. “We had people everywhere,” she said. “I was faxing casting calls to every high school in a major city that had a good sports program. I went to all the swim teams in the tri-state area.” It was relatively hard to cast a show like this, she explained. They needed geographic diversity, ethnic diversity, and a mix of strong and recognizable personalities distributed along a four–four gender split. They also needed everyone to have some baseline athletic ability, as well as parents who would sign off on the textbook-length release forms—parents like this being, Jess noted, rarer than you’d think. She and our other producer, Stephen, had owned our full likenesses, and could have used the footage for any purpose. “I wouldn’t let my kid do it!” she said. “You wouldn’t either!” (Later on, I found my mom’s neat signature on the liability waiver, which required her to release the producers, Noggin, MTV Networks, and Viacom International for “any claim or liability whatsoever,” and to “forever release, waive, and covenant not to sue the Released Parties for any injury or death caused by negligence or other acts.”)
Jess checked her watch—at six, she needed to go relieve her babysitter in Harlem—and then ordered us a margherita pizza. She explained that reality TV casting is mainly about identifying people with a basic telegenic quality—“people who really cut through TV, who can keep their eyes at a certain level, who can look right past the camera.” She had gotten on the phone with all of us, asking: How would we react if we had a problem with someone? Did we have a boyfriend or girlfriend at home? “You can tell a lot about a sixteen-year-old by their answer to that question—how open they are, how insecure,” she said. “There’s insecurity inherent in being a teenager, but it doesn’t read well on camera if you’re uncomfortable. On reality TV, you need people with zero insecurity. Or else you need someone so insecure that it drives them totally nuts.”
The formula for group shows was pretty basic, Jess told me. Even adult shows often ran on high school archetypes. You usually had the jock, the prom queen, the weird guy, the nerd, the “spastic girl who’s a little babyish.” I asked her if I could guess how we’d all been cast. “Kelley was the cool girl,” I guessed. “Paris was the spaz. Cory was the sweet country boy. Demian was the goofball. Ryder was supposed to be the jock. Krystal was the bitch, the prissy girl.”
“Yeah, the sort of supermodel type,” Jess said.
“What about Ace?” I asked. “Krystal guessed that you guys cast him so that you guys could have a black couple.” (Krystal—who had a dry sense of humor, and was not at all a bitch—had described her role to me as “standard reality TV black girl.”)
“We definitely needed diversity,” Jess said. “And you?”
“Was I the nerd?” I asked. (I was also cast for diversity reasons, I’m sure.)
“No,” she said. “Although I do remember this one night where you started doing homework. Stephen and I were like, this is awful television, we have to get her to stop.”
“Was I … the reasonable one?”
“No!” Jess said. “We were hoping you wouldn’t be reasonable! When we pitched you to the network it was as this know-it-all, a type-A valedictorian.” She added that she’d also cast me because I seemed athletic—I had done a tumbling pass on the football field in my audition tape, neatly concealing the fact that I have so little hand-eye coordination that I can barely catch a ball.
On the porch, KELLEY, KRYSTAL, and JIA talk about how KELLEY is going to play ACE and CORY off each other to drive a wedge between the boys. The boys try to use PARIS, whose crush on RYDER makes her easy to manipulate, to undermine the girls. PARIS is ramping up the drama, crying, talking nonstop. RYDER keeps losing his cool mid-competition. “I don’t deserve, like, any sort of negativity feelings,” RYDER yells, shirtless and skipping stones in the ocean. “That’s bullshit!”
The teens prepare to go out dancing. DEMIAN is still trying to make out with JIA. Wearing a shirt on his head, ACE does a pitch-perfect impression of JIA blowing DEMIAN off. After a montage of everyone politely grinding at an outdoor beach bar, the teens come back to the house, where the hosts are waiting. Everyone’s going to vote to kick someone off the island. One person from each team will be sent home.
It took me months to work up the courage to actually watch Girls v. Boys, which was an unusual feeling: the show itself is proof that I don’t hesitate to do much. But I found that I physically could not bring myself to restart the show. In the winter of