MTV's The Real World can probably be credited with starting the "reality TV" craze. Now, I fully understand that there were plenty of reality-based television shows before The Real World came along. That's why I'm not going to credit the music channel with inventing the genre; rather, like so many other ideas they've exploited, they made it popular.

The premise of the show is fairly straightforward: a mixture of good-looking college-age men and women are placed into communal living for six months. The house is designed so that the roommates are pretty much forced to interact with one another and an obvious attempt is made to to put conflicting personality types together. Cameras and microphones are strategically placed throughout the living area in order to capture every detail. It's a voyeuristic wet dream.

MTV edits the show into half-hour bites that supposedly serve up all the best stuff. However, we all know that there's no way they can show everything and some of the better moments are bound to be too much for even MTV. So, what they've done is packaged up unreleased footage into a series of DVDs. I took a look at The Real World You Never Saw: Back To New York, but I would imagine all of them are pretty much the same.

First of all, I want to make one thing clear: For all of the claims of "never before seen" footage, there really wasn't anything on the disc that was significantly above and beyond what they already broadcast. The only real difference is that swearing is no longer beeped out.

Don't ask me why, but I actually managed to catch quite a few episodes of this season when it aired. That could be because MTV insisted on broadcasting the show 24 hours a day, but I don't want to get sidetracked by a rant about MTV's scheduling habits. Having seen some of the show, I can say that there is quite a bit of stuff here that wasn't broadcast. Some of it is simply more footage from storylines already on the show and a few other things are genuinely new bits.

I want to reiterate that despite the new footage, uncensored harsh language is about as wild as this disc gets. The reason I feel this is important to emphasize is because the DVD packaging gives some tantalizing hints about night vision cameras, skinny dipping adventures and more. When it comes right down to it, however, there is no reason why the contents of this disc couldn't have been edited into two more half-hour episodes.

There are 19 chapter stops for the main portion of the disc and it's set up so that nearly each chapter is its own mini episode focusing on one aspect of the roommates' time together. The cast assembles in three groups (Coral and Lori are one groups, Nicole and Rachel another, and Mike, Kevin and Malik make up the final group) and offers comments on the events in each chapter. There are a couple of funny bits, such as Mike's "Miz" character performing an Atomic Wedgie on some poor kid, but most of what you'll find here is just as mindless as the regular series.