‘Real World Homecoming New Orleans’ Episode 4 Recap: “It Shouldn’t Be Comfortable We’re Talking About Racism”

We have made it through three tough episodes of The Real World Homecoming: New Orleans, and we have earned a moment to breathe, to reflect, to celebrate. Episode 4 (“It Shouldn’t Be Comfortable, We’re Talking About Racism”) will give us that moment, but as in any horror franchise, we’re going to have to power through some jump scares first.

So, okay- when we left off in Episode 3, Tokyo had called a house meeting about Julie being a nightmare, and in that house meeting, Julie was carefully pleading her own case, and also being a nightmare. We join the action in medias res, as Melissa accuses Julie of trying to create storylines and then immediately revealing that she overheard Julie telling her husband exactly that. There is flashback footage and everything. The evidence is overwhelming, and in the face of it, Julie manages to give up the game, aggrandize herself, and ask for our pity all in the same moment. “I don’t want to be the star of this show, so everyone please, pick up the mantle, do something so this show is interesting so I don’t have to be the center of attention.” The casual racism, the bachelorette-party-at-a-gay-bar whooping drunkenness, the truly diabolical ability to ward off a hangover? Do not hold these against me, Julie seems to say. I did these things for you.

Kelley and Tokyo make the very good point that it is not her responsibility, nor any of theirs, to make good television. The option to just exist as people is right there on the table next to Jamie’s massive orange water bottle. You can just talk like adults! You need neither boot nor rally!

Danny does momentarily come to Julie’s defense, saying that the exit from the bar did seem quite sudden and that he too would have liked to stay a little longer. But even he has to admit that Julie’s head was immediately out the window of the Yukon, so maybe the quick exit was a good idea. It’s not a full-throated defense, but it’s something, and Julie fails to pick up on it, instead moving to end the argument in a pouty and self-serving way: “Apparently, the way I’m living my life is not working in this house, so I am going to dial it down.”

BUT THEN! One brief moment of reflection and vulnerability! “First of all,” she says like one-millionth of all, “I am embarrassed about what happened in the club, I don’t know what it’s going to look like on TV because I don’t remember it, and I have kids.” This is honest. This is human! This is progress! But the white woman tears begin, and that is Melissa’s cue to leave.

Matt says he’s beginning to understand the depth of the hurt feelings between Melissa and Julie. It’s more than just a disagreement in the moment, he says, “it’s deep hurt between two old friends, and it’s multilayered.” Jamie looks like he’d rather be on a Challenge. Paul is probably outside the house, like: “Can we run my scene again, with like two more shirt buttons buttoned?”

This is a decent time to tell you that the drama on this season is not only happening on this screen. It is playing out in Instagram stories, in comments sections, and on podcasts (including my own! Danny and Melissa were such good guests on Homophilia that we had to make it a two-parter!). Both Julie and Melissa have pointed out that these arguments are deceptively edited, which is obvious to anyone who watches shows like these. For Julie to point this out feels defensive, which of course it is, because she has eyes and ears just like you and can see how poorly she’s coming off. Melissa is being gracious in making this case. She could easily just sit back and look good. So there may be some peace in our time, if Julie can relax and accept it. (Melissa is on IG at @melissabeckrwno, and the great Tracie Morrissey is doing some excellent journalism screencapping Julie’s comments at @traciemorrissey.)

In the bedroom, Melissa is taking a moment to find her center. She’s worried that Julie is working a storyline, trying to win the audience’s favor by crying, and that if Melissa reacts in any way, then she’s at risk of looking like the angry Black lady, so it’s a no-win situation. Kelley, because she is wise and serene and could very easily just get on a plane and go back to a house where Scott Wolf lives, agrees: “Julie is still trying to be dramatic for television, and I don’t want to be a part of that.” Melissa sums it up perfectly: “The real thing, is that she needs to go straight to jail.”

We laugh, but as our government fails and a revolution seems inevitable, “being shitty on a reality show” could become a federal offense with a mandatory minimum prison sentence in our lifetimes. I’m ready to circulate that petition.

So Kelley and Melissa are cordial but a little spiky with Julie, which is probably not comfortable but is certainly the best-case scenario for her. “This is Mean Girl Acres,” Julie complains in an interview. “This is The Golden Girls on crack.” Now, let’s get one thing straight: Crack is cheap. The Golden Girls made too much money ever to smoke crack, let’s get that straight. Okay? They don’t do crack. They don’t do that. Crack is whack.

Actually, let’s get two things straight: The Golden Girls would not do crack, but they probably would do MDMA, and The Golden Girls on MDMA already happened, and it was called Sex and the City.

Anyway, a new day begins, and it promises a field trip back to the swamp. In the original season, the gang went on a swamp tour, and the tour guide pointed out a bird he called some kind of folksy name with the N word right in the middle of it, the kind of very casual yet still jaw-dropping racism that I would like to say is less common now but almost definitely is not. Back in 2000, Jamie couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, and for a second you kind of wonder why he’s not getting roasted over that. (Melissa addresses this in her IG story; Jamie has since apologized, and apologized again, and also is hot.) (She did not say that last part.) (I said that last part.)

Melissa doesn’t want to go on the swamp boat trip, not because of the fresh memory of racism, but because it will get muddy. I understand Melissa extremely well here. I did one of those Tough Mudder races a couple of years ago, and at the finish line, a fellow racer pointed out how little actual mud I had on myself, and I said with total earnestness: “Isn’t the point of this race to avoid getting dirty?” And then we stared at each other with total mutual incomprehension for like five solid minutes. So: Melissa, we are simpatico. I can pay for the activity, or the activity can get filth in my hair, we will not be doing both. Anyway, the boat trip goes off without any of the guides saying anything racist, which counts as a Louisiana triumph.

We are promised a visit from Melissa’s parents Shorty and Mercy. Apparently they paid a visit during the original season, but the footage never made it to air, though it could have said a lot about families of color. Seems to me a similar thing happened to Heather B in season one and was briefly addressed on the first season of Homecoming. What a strange coincidence! Probably nothing to read into too deeply! Melissa hasn’t seen her folks since the fall of 2019, so she is ready. Melissa also reveals how she came to be married to her husband, Justin Beck of Glassjaw: apparently they’d known one another for a while, and then he called her like “Do you wanna fuck,” and now here they are, married with three kids. Gentlemen, do not learn the wrong lesson about whether you should be aggressive like this over phone or text. You probably still should not.

But anyway it’s been like nine seconds since we gave Julie an opportunity to come off badly, so let’s get back to the house for another Incoming Message about race. We see some pretty rough moments from the original season: Julie saying “what color do you think I am” when Melissa tells her to grab her a pudding, Jamie telling Melissa what a problem black-on-black crime is, Melissa talking about white privilege in a way that could have been from earlier today. In the present, Melissa opens the conversation by saying, “So, y’all got your shit together yet?” She reveals that she got hate mail back in 2000 because she held people’s feet to the fire about their casual racism, that she was portrayed as annoying, and that her whole identity became “Melissa who is obsessed with race.” She says she’s happy to continue talking about all of this stuff, but also, “if you have questions, Google is your friend.”

One gets the sense that even Google would like to distance itself from Julie. On the topic of her having used the word “colored” in the year of our Lord 2000, she says, “I know we’re all supposed to show up with a PhD about everyone else’s experience,” which is not true, and then “I probably hadn’t even met a Black person when I showed up the first time,” which is almost definitely true, and also the problem. She does say she’s faced up to the racism of the Mormon church, and has since left that church over it, so that’s something. But Tokyo and Melissa remind her that she was raised in an environment where “Black is bad,” so she still needs to check herself for the vestigial elements of that in her own present-day thinking. “Well,” she says, “that’s hard when the teachers are screaming at me.”

That goes over about as well as you would imagine. A productive conversation about race has once again been derailed and made about Julie’s feelings, and Melissa and Tokyo hold it together better than I would, and Julie is reminded of a moment from the day they moved in, when Tokyo wanted to open a suitcase to find out whether it was his, but he asked her to watch him do it, and she didn’t get why, but now she’s like, “wait, I wouldn’t have to do that,” and the whole world is like YES! THAT’S THE POINT! JUST ACKNOWLEDGE IT AND TRY TO CALL IT OUT WHEN YOU SEE IT! So it’s all making sense to her now. She addresses her behavior from the club night: “I had a selfish night, and that affects you in a way that doesn’t occur to me, and I just ask that you forgive me my trespasses, because I will mess up again.” So that’s something. “Just let me try to do better,” Julie says, and it’s good news because the idea of Julie doing worse is pretty gruesome.

The conversation wraps up, and Jamie says, “Uhhhhh GREAT WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO FOR DINNER,” in the tone of a handsome straight white guy who likes to party a little bit and has successfully avoided most unpleasant moments throughout his life. I would like to be less drawn to the world’s Jamies, but here we are.

Afterwards, Melissa wonders whether she went a little too hard. “My tone was stank,” she admits. “My tone was a little tangy, and it didn’t need to be that way. That wasn’t fair to Julie.” She wonders whether she should apologize, Kelley urges her to be “direct, clear, and quick,” like the life coach she is. I am ready for Kelley’s book.

So Melissa does in fact apologize to Julie: “To you, I say: that wasn’t nice.” They have a nice conversation that is direct, clear and quick, and Melissa wraps it up like this: “Now we can continue our weird dance of tiptoeing around each other until we can get it together.” The social media evidence suggests that weird dance continues. It’s a weird dance-a-thon.

The next morning, Julie runs through some yoga poses with Jamie, who is not at all flexible, and as a guy around his age, this may be the most relatable moment of the entire series.

It will not surprise you that Melissa’s parents are absolutely delightful. Their visit brings some joy to the house right when we needed it. Melissa tells her dad, “When you were here last, Julie couldn’t have a drink. But now she can have a drink with you.” Shorty replies, “She can only have this much, because I’ll have the rest,” and though we know that is NOT the reason she can only have this much, we hope that Shorty is a man of his word.

Also through this whole cooking scene, in which Mercy makes like four thousand dishes at once, we are shown snippets of Tokyo’s musical YouTube cooking channel. Here is the promise I make to you, the reader: I will cook a Tokyo meal between now and next episode. I seal it with a virtual handshake and a sincere dwee-da-do-dwee-da-do-dway.

Shorty and Mercy bring the temperature down in the house. Julie and Melissa reminisce about their immediate post-show lives, in a way that is extremely early aughts. “I used to date Chad from New Found Glory,” Julie says. “Right, and we signed the guest book at Mark Hoppus’s house,” Melissa replies. The conversation is one Richard Hatch short of a 2000 royal flush.

So things are okay in the house for the time being. Shorty and Mercy’s visit was merciful, and short. The tension is lower. Things seem like they’re going to be okay.

But again, this is a horror franchise, so the killer is about to pop back up.

Next week, Kelley has a migraine-inducing conversation with Julie, the gang goes to some kind of Mini Gras, and we will revisit and perhaps re-record the 2000 classic “Come On Be My Baby Tonight,” which needs to sell one million physical copies to right the karmic balance of the universe. They should have timed this for Record Store Day.

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now. He also hosts the Real World podcast Truu Stowray, available wherever you get your podcasts.