LI's Melissa Beck reunites with 'Real World' cast

A Roslyn stay-at-home mom relives a halcyon moment of her youth when Melissa Beck reunites with cast-mates who knew her as Melissa Howard, as "The Real World Homecoming: New Orleans" begins streaming early Wednesday morning on Paramount+.

"We really had lost touch for 10, 20 years each," says Beck, 45, who as a 22-year-old Tampa law-firm office worker was thrust into early reality-TV stardom alongside six other young people on MTV's "The Real World: New Orleans" in 2000. "Coming into 'Homecoming,' it kind of felt true to the experiment of the first time of seven strangers. It was strangers again, meeting for the first time as adults who had also survived reality TV. So it was really a fascinating social and psychological experience as much as it was nostalgia."

The seminal reality-TV show "The Real World," which premiered in 1992, threw disparate fledgling adults together in a fabulous house or apartment and contrived situations for them to react to: As Beck told a Cornell University audience in 2001, certain individuals on her season, such as her boss, Elton, were actors. Beck starred alongside David Broom, Jamie Murray, Matt Smith, Julie Stoffer, Kelley Wolf and Danny Roberts, who was among the first openly gay reality-TV stars — so early that his Navy boyfriend's face had to be blurred out. Broom is African-American, and the Japan-born Beck the daughter of a Filipino mother and a Black father deployed overseas for the U.S. Air Force.

That 2000 season of "The Real World" focused to a great extent on the Mormon Stoffer learning to understand her diverse housemates. "I had to carry a lot of conversations about race when those topics came up," Beck tells Newsday. "I think the lens of the show was that of a young, white, naive girl. And her story then becomes my story, becomes the Black guy's story, becomes the gay guy's story. We're all part of her awakening," she recalls with frustration, adding optimistically that, "Now, since reality TV has been a thing for a long enough time, the narrative doesn't have to be that way." 

The show, she says, had made her "extremely famous and not rich. … You got $5,000 for your story. My time on reality TV, before the social-media age, where famous people become very accessible, was a really different time. Because afterward there was 'The Hills' and 'Jersey Shore' and those people went on to become very famous and reality TV was actually a lucrative career option. It wasn't when I was on it."

Living in Los Angeles after the series aired, Beck co-hosted MTV's "The Challenge" in 2003, was one of four stars of the Oxygen hidden-camera prank show "Girls Behaving Badly," and then competed on Bravo's 2005 "Battle of the Network Reality Stars." She met her future husband, Long Island post-punk cult figure Justin Beck of the band Glassjaw, when his online company Merch Direct //cq two words// took her on as a client to sell prints of her paintings. The two married in 2007 and are the parents of daughters Shalom, 13, Maja, 9, and Shira, 6.

She moved to Long Island for love and then found she loved Long Island. "If you're not from Long Island and you come to Long Island, it can be kind of scary because there are systems in place that you don't understand. But after you've been here awhile, you create your own little bubble. I love it. I have my bagel place, I have my nails place, I have my preferred Italian, I have my preferred sushi. I'm living a really awesome, quiet suburban life. I've become a Long Island person that doesn't ever want to leave."