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It's especially unmooring as a viewer because in the original Real World: New Orleans, no character was more cared for and catered to by the production than Julie. She needs Danny to forgive and Melissa to forget, but neither is interested in doing that so quickly (in Danny's case) or at all (in Melissa's). It's uncomfortable to watch someone twist in the wind, even if it's of their own doing, and that's what it's like watching Julie, whose desperation to get past all the bad feelings is written all over her face. (Unless you choose to belive that Danny and Melissa both decided to invent these letters out of whole cloth, which seems, to put it mildly, unlikely.) It's Tokyo who hands her what she believes to be her best strategic option, which is owning up to the fact that anything that her management may have done on her behalf back then (which Julie still refuses to admit she knew about) is still her fault because "the buck stops with me." It is an incredibly manipulative way of appearing to fall on her sword while still maintaining the fiction that she didn't do what she almost certainly did. Who among us doesn't have a long-stagnant regret that we'd love to make right? But, as Danny astutely clocks, Julie wants to get to the part where everybody is okay with each other again without trudging through the muck of accountability and the slow steps of re-building the trust that was lost, and so in the season premiere we got a lot of Julie crying and desperately searching for a way to apologize without admitting to having done anything so depraved as slandering the gay man and biracial woman she'd lived with for months over something so crass as a speaking engagement fee. She did something bad and wrecked what were once close friendships, and that wreckage has been left unaddressed for twenty years. She's the one coming into this situation with the most regrets. What's frustrating as a viewer is that there’s a version of this story where Julie is the most relatable character on Homecoming. Also not wrong to be guarded is Melissa, who was also subject to letters misrepresenting her character, about which Julie denies any knowledge. As we find out later, he's not wrong to be guarded, because Julie still doesn't seem willing to own up to what actually happened (in the aftermath of their season, she and/or her manager wrote a letter to schools looking to hire Danny for mentorship engagements and slandered Danny as being of low moral character, i.e. For Danny, it's an apology without accountability, and it's all happening too easily and quickly.
That's why the first thing she does when she sees Danny is sob on his shoulder and say she's so sorry. What's interesting is that as much as she later tries to downplay and backpedal what exactly happened to cause her rift with both Danny and Melissa, Julie initially approaches the New Orleans reunion as someone who knows she screwed up. As she explained in her interview segments, Julie hadn’t spoken to any of her old roommates in 20 years, and it wasn't exactly due to benign neglect. She kicked off the season as the most nervous looking woman ever to board a trolley car. Let's back up, though, because Julie’s story didn't have to go this way. "Belligerence," as Melissa so succinctly puts it, "has arrived." Episode two, however, brought a whole new layer to the proceedings, as a night out at a New Orleans gay bar went from Drag Night to "drag your roommate out of the bar before the bouncers do it for you" night. The season's first episode was dominated by Julie struggling - often refusing - to face up to the apologies she owed Danny and Melissa, which was stressful in the kind of way that watching someone dig a hole deeper and deeper for themselves while everybody else watches with expressions that very clearly read, "Wow, you're really just digging that hole, aren't you?" can be stressful.
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Then there's the story of Julie Stoffer, who's been the focal point of almost all of this Homecoming season's most dramatic moments, and whose vibe has me more stressed out than any character on TV in recent memory. Episode two introduced the thoughtful, reflective, and deeply complicated story of Danny, whose boyfriend Paul at the time of the original Real World: New Orleans was in the military and bound by Don't Ask, Don't Tell strictures, a story that's been re-contextualized with the passage of time, and Danny admitting what a crushing weight it all was on him.
There's also been the dishy rubbernecking of long-simmering bad blood between Julie and her ex-housemates, in particular Melissa and Danny.
Nostalgia has taken the front seat, as we've been re-introduced to the cast we first met as as twentysomethings. Over its first two episodes, the New Orleans season of The Real World Homecoming has been a tale of competing vibes.