College Life: Premier

College Life
Mondays, 10:30pm on MTV

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has an impressive academic reputation, thanks in no small part to its English department and its honors curriculum. But you would have no idea it was anything more than a house party by watching MTV’s College Life. MTV gave 4 freshman hand-held cameras, and ask them to film their lives. If your freshman year was anything like mine, you would think that would make for a great deal of drama, intrigue, awkward sex, and on-screen crying. All the ingredients of great reality TV, right?

Unfortunately, in order to avoid turning the campus into The City: College Edition, the University denied MTV access to film any of the series in the academic buildings. The result is a claustrophobic series of poorly lit dorm room conversations and riotous frat parties which takes a lot of the drama out of the subject matter.

MTV had an interesting choice with College Life. If they brought in film crews, they would have limited access, and they would run the risk of creating a staged, phony quality, as it is impossible to forget you’re on camera with 4 men following you everywhere. At the same time, if MTV let the students film themselves, they would get much more candid and natural footage, but the students wouldn’t film anything embarrassing or potentially embarrassing. And what is college but a laundry list of things we regret?

MTV gave cameras to Jordan (Jamaican-Canadian introvert), Andrea (conservative Christian), Alex (academic with trust issues), and Kevin (hard partying jock) and allowed them to film themselves. Whenever anything starts getting good (Andrea going over to a guy’s place to make out! Kevin drinks to hard and fails calc!) the students don’t or can’t film it. So what we do get are a lot of myspace-style head shots with the cameras tilted up, and people shouting “whoo hoo!” a lot.

I’m sure the show has material down there somewhere. We can all relate to the insecurity and the drama of starting college, the awkward mistakes and the mishandling of relationships. But why oh why does the show have to be so boring? You feel like you’re being dragged from one messy room to another, never really listening to people talk, never really seeing anything cooler than beerpong. If college life was really like that, it would be astonishing that any of us grew up into functioning adults.