E-Mail This Article to a Friend Keeping it real (continued)

AT AROUND 1:30 p.m. at the Rack, no one else has arrived for the casting call, so while Cushing and Sirotin munch on cheese quesadillas, Borbet ventures outside to wrangle up prospective recruits. The skittish Long Island native is at once obnoxious, antagonizing, witty, and girlishly chatty — he talks rapid-fire, like a machine gun shooting Nerf bullets. Inside Abercrombie & Fitch, he sidles up to a pretty female clerk folding shirts, his boldness giving way when she responds to his want-to-audition-for-a-reality-show advances with suspicion. Back outside, he approaches a gaggle of cute girls, but when their smiles reveal braces, Borbet realizes they’re too young.

Mostly unsuccessful, Borbet returns to the Rack to find two women filling out paperwork by the door. "Watch me hit on them and then watch one of them turn out to be my bunkmate," he jokes. One, in fact, does: a blond, 21-year-old Asian woman wearing a pink shirt with one shoulder. Her name’s Janine, and she heard about the casting call through Craigslist. Right now, she’s leaning against the bar scribbling an application:

Name a cause you would die for and why:

"I would die for the love of my life!"

The thing that scares me most:

"The toilet overflowing!"

How would someone who really knows you describe your worst traits?

"Crazy, psycho, wants everything, problems trusting"

Later, in an episode of The Roomies, Borbet decides to hide Janine’s facial products under her bunk’s covers. He gripes that she’s never around their East Boston digs, so he wants to see if she ever sleeps in her bed. "For every time people aren’t around," says Borbet to the camera, "I think I’m just going to start setting booby traps. Because this is just ridiculous that I’m like sitting here by myself all the time. It’s like, our job is very simple. A lot of people have very hard jobs. Our job is very simple. All we have to do is be around and, like, you get paid to be around. The premise is very obvious."

Unlike on The Real World, the strangers on The Roomies do get paid. They’re salaried workers who’ve signed contracts and leases, agreeing to pay rent with the money they’re making. If they don’t? As Garabedian puts it, they "get thrown out, as well as fired." The average roomie’s lifespan is two to six months, depending on the terms of his or her contract and, according to The Roomies applications, "audience-approval rating."

The Roomies isn’t XY.tv’s only programming. Dinner is an inchoate Roomies spin-off, a roundtable discussion in which cast members sit around a table behind XY.tv mugs and chew over "issues of today," like kissing etiquette, domestic violence, and club fashion. "Dinner is our take on Independent Film Channel’s Dinner for Five," says Garabedian. "But instead of a bunch of 60-year-olds, we have a bunch of 20-year-olds. It’s a totally different show." So instead of Jon Favreau leading a dialogue with Maggie Gyllenhaal, John Sayles, and Lili Taylor, Dinner sees the ever-boisterous Borbet leading conversations like:

Jason Borbet: J.Lo has ruined women everywhere. The butts today on women are so disgusting.... The butts are getting huge. Rrrrr. [J.Lo] gets that butt by working out a specific way. Girls get that from eating too much and not working out. And then they’re like, ‘Oh, I have a great booty.’

Janine: I think that’s good now, if they’re confident.

Jason: I don’t think it’s good.

Carlos: Doesn’t Jennifer Lopez have insurance on her butt?

Jason: Yeah, she does. Just like Tyson has insurance on his face and he is, like, that’s a lethal weapon. Her butt is a lethal weapon. She must take up like two seats in a bus.

Janine: Nooooo.

Jason: You’ve got this skinny little torso popping out of this huge base.

Janine: I think it’s great that women are starting to feel more confident about their big butts.

Jason: Oh, yeah, Miss 100 Pound, Thin As a Rail. It’s easy for you to say that.

The slickest show in the XY.tv line-up is Common Ave, a pounding-the-pavement program in which host Charles Hess traipses the sidewalks of neighborhoods like Harvard Square, Kenmore Square, and Downtown Crossing, questioning college-age pedestrians on subjects like pets, psychics, and skin. It’s a simple concept, but Hess has natural ease in front of the camera and gets his subjects to respond humorously. The fourth show ready for XY’s local launch is Video Lounge Live, a video-request show MC’d by Romeo, a DJ at KISS 108. "That’s sort of like [MTV’s] TRL, but it’s not," says Garabedian. "TRL is an afternoon show, daytime show. This is more of a club show. The audience for it is a little older — we have DJs and dancers. It will be more like a cross between Electric Circus on Fuse and The Gong Show."

And then there are the videos. XY.tv splices videos between segments of each program, so each show is intermittently interrupted by both advertisements and music videos — which one might think would drive away couch potatoes armed with the clicker. But Garabedian sees them as part of the whole. "Videos are interstitially placed, just like in a Broadway musical — to kind of break it up," he explains.

Garabedian thinks Dinner still needs some work, but he believes all his shows’ concepts are solid — so even if each cast member doesn’t always turn out to be as charismatic or compelling as initially imagined, he’s not ready to abandon any of his programs yet. "We see it like Saturday Night Live. It’s had its high points and its miserable points. And that’s where I think we take a different approach," he explains. "Conventional network philosophy is like throwing shit against the wall: you see what sticks. Our philosophy is: no, stick with it and see what happens."

ONE QUESTION persists: if you need cable to view XY.tv, why would anyone choose it — a Boston-based knock-off of pre-existing concepts — over MTV? Garabedian answers as if it’s a stupid question. "Well, there’s a program on XY that appeals to you over the one that’s currently playing on MTV. MTV may be running — what’s that show with Johnny Knoxville?"

"Jackass."

"Jackass, yes! We’ll be running some drama like The Roomies. Chances are if you’re a female, you’re going to be attracted to the drama more than you are to some bad boy doing stunts that are not female-friendly." Garabedian admits that XY.tv seeks to attract more females, chiefly because, he says, "women are more loyal viewers."

Fair enough. But why do something that’s already being done with a much bigger budget? "It’s not already being done," Garabedian insists. "MTV has one line-up of programs. NBC has one line-up of programs. You’re saying, ‘Why should there be a CBS?’ The answer is that there’s an alternative."

Later, he adds, "Why should somebody watch Gone with the Wind instead of Casablanca? You know, they’re both dramas, they’re both traumas. The answer is: because they’re different. Some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate. If the only flavor is vanilla, life gets pretty boring, doesn’t it?"

On the subject of whether The Roomies is derivative of The Real World, Garabedian persists. "It’s derivative of American Family," he says, citing a 1970s show in which PBS filmed an entire family’s life. "The Real World stole it from An American Family; MTV stole it from PBS."

But why would a viewer rather watch someone living in broken-down East Boston rather than Paris or sunny San Diego? "Who in Iowa relates to Real World Paris?" Garabedian says. "Give me a break. Paris?"

Visit www.xy.tv for more information. Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com