E-Mail This Article to a Friend Keeping it real Locally produced XY.tv goes after the next-young-thang market with three years of programming already in the can BY CAMILLE DODERO

The turnout of exhibitionists for today’s reality-television casting call is surprisingly low — only five young men show up at the Rack during the first hour. A year and a half ago, even NBC’s destined-to-be-a-flop Lost drew at least 10 times more people to the very same venue. But this afternoon’s tryouts aren’t for a prime-time role on a major network. They’re for a series called The Roomies, the flagship show of a cable channel no one has ever seen. "That’s the problem when we have a casting call," admits XY.tv senior producer Jason Sirotin, motioning to the five people filling out paperwork and posing for Polaroids. "No one knows what XY.tv is."

Slated to launch on RCN Digital in the metro-Boston area this Monday on channel 109, XY.tv brands itself as "real-life television for the new generation." Pepsi-like mottoes aside, the digital-cable station is poised to target the X and Y generations with a 24-hour line-up of mainstream pop videos and "real-life" programming. Owned by John Garabedian, veteran Boston DJ, host of the nationally syndicated Saturday-night radio show Open House Party, and former V66 co-owner, XY.tv is a medley of MTV2 and reality television — an early-’80s vehicle retrofitted with 21st-century parts.

The similarities between MTV and XY.tv don’t end with the music. The Roomies, which already has many segments in the can, features five 18-to-23-year-old strangers who "are picked to live in a house and have their lives recorded." Not only do the telegenic tenants deliver self-obsessed soliloquies to the camera in one-on-one confessionals ("My mother pisses me off," spits Marti, a sassy, sleek-haired siren who dreams of becoming a pop star), but they bicker, bitch, whine, and squeal about everything from each others’ bad habits to absentee roommates. Sound familiar? Yep, The Roomies is a low-budget version of MTV’s The Real World. The biggest difference is that The Roomies aren’t thrown together in an iron-gated Parisian chateau, a hot-tub-equipped Las Vegas suite, or even a refurbished fire station in Beacon Hill. Rather, these strangers share bunk-bedded rooms in a row house nestled in East Boston’s Maverick Square.

The Roomies, which has been filming since 2000, has been available for viewing only via closed-circuit television for XY.tv employees. As it happens, one of the current roomies is here at the casting call, armed with a video camera to film a future XY.tv special about the casting process. He’s Jason Borbet, a restless, fashionably rumpled 23-year-old with deliberately mussed bleached-blond hair. Borbet spastically interrogates anyone who’ll talk to him, zipping around the room like an ADD-suffering kid out of Ritalin. Meanwhile, Sirotin and two other XY.tv employees, including news anchor and Roomies story editor Courtney Cushing, mull over possible questions to lob at the interviewees, ranging from slumber-party prattle ("What’s your worst break-up experience?") to the dutifully civic ("Are you a registered voter?") to blunt intrusion ("Have you ever taken part in an abortion?"). The trio settle on specific talking points, including "What was the most painfully uncomfortable moment of your entire life?" and, as an icebreaker, "When was the last time you ate fast food?" ("Judging by these two," grins Sirotin, waving Polaroids of two hefty aspiring cast members slouched on the patio, "a lot.")

When it’s finally their time to shine, the hopefuls don’t. Seated in a booth, under the relentless scrutiny of three casting directors, a camera lens, and a microphone, the group’s discourse is abysmally dull — the blustery, sophomoric sort you’d imagine taking place between high-school outcasts sidelined during gym class. There’s Felix, an Asian-American Barbizon Modeling School grad with a shiny complexion who admits not only that this is one of a smattering of auditions he’s attending today, but that he’s wearing foundation makeup. There’s bear-like Jarumi, a self-deprecating homeboy who says he aspires to be a "two-way-pager pimp" and identifies his most painfully uncomfortable experience as the time he had sex with a girl resembling Jamie Foxx’s In Living Color alter-ego Wanda the Ugly Woman ("Nice body, ugly face"). Jarumi’s pal is Edison, a pudgy kid who doesn’t say much — unlike voluble Victor, a 22-year-old Colombian immigrant who continually digresses into long-winded monologues, including an irrelevant I’m-a-real-man confession that he dated his high-school English teacher. The most vaguely interesting of the bunch is Keith, a boyish 19-year-old bisexual with a fuzzy chin, greasy hair, and a white tank top who talks uneasily about his father being unaware of his sexuality and brags about having advanced through three rounds of American Idol auditions to meet infamously nasty judge Simon Cowell. Keith clearly believes he’s star material: on his XY.tv questionnaire, he lists the most important issue facing him today as "How I’m going to make my fame happen."

After the XY.tv crew cuts the conversation short — not before Cushing scribbles down a "wrap it up" SOS to Sirotin — the producers’ notes jotted on the aspirants’ applications reflect their impressions. Felix’s paperwork says simply, "Makeup." Victor’s reads, "So annoyingly boring." Edison’s and Jarumi’s pages are unmarked. And on Keith’s application? His says, "Oily, yucky."

Apparently Keith’s grease wasn’t repellent enough to disqualify him from the show, though. The impish star wanna-be appears briefly on The Roomies as the token gay boy, a whiny, sparring housemate who incites drama and heated discussion about homosexuality, intolerance, and prejudice, along with a nasty exchange of offensive slurs. Carlos, a lanky roomie with a stripe shaved into each eyebrow and a seemingly permanent sideways baseball hat, and Derrick (Marty’s ubiquitous boyfriend), who chills at the house so often he’s become a supporting character, don’t seem to like the new addition much — especially when a Web cam catches Keith making himself at home by frolicking around half-naked with his boyfriend. Tempers flare and fighting words flow: as housemate Borbet recounts in his online journal, "they got into a heated arguement [sic] where the f and n words surfaced. lovely situation." Within a week, Keith decides to leave.

It seems counterintuitive that Keith would prance around in his undies with his beau in front of the camera — especially since he still claims to be concerned about his dad discovering his bisexuality. Either he saw his public displays of affection as a non-confrontational way to break the news, or he didn’t think his antics would ever be broadcast. Which isn’t all that impossible, since The Roomies has been filmed for three years without the general public actually seeing it.

The Roomies, and by extension XY.tv, is a direct consequence of a failed Internet business. But in the broader scope, it’s essentially a return to television for self-described "local institution" John Garabedian. A self-made communications entrepreneur who built his reputation as a disc jockey on WBCN Radio (104.1 FM), Garabedian secured what he describes as a "nice bank account" by creating and selling sundry radio and television properties — for example, he originally applied for the FCC license to a Cape Cod station that eventually became 96.3 FM, "The Rose." Garabedian’s highest-profile exploit was V66 (a/k/a WVJV TV), a Framingham-based UHF channel he co-owned in the mid ’80s that followed MTV’s lead, reapplying the playlist-driven formula of mainstream radio to the visual medium.

But V66 lasted less than two years. "Then I had the freedom to do nothing for the rest of my life," says Garabedian, seated on a leather couch in his spacious Southborough living room, dressed casually in jeans and a black golf shirt with an XY.tv insignia. "I could sit on a beach and go fishing. Or I could drive a taxi or fly an airplane — I am a pilot. There’s my airport out there," he says, motioning to runways visible through sliding-glass doors that lead onto a deck. "I thought, ‘What do I love doing?’ And I couldn’t think of anything I loved doing more than being on the radio." Not long after he sold V66 to the Home Shopping Network, Garabedian started hosting Open House Party, a Saturday-night show on KISS 108 broadcast from Garabedian’s home studio and featuring superstar guests like the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears.

In order to distribute Open House Party nationally, Garabedian founded a subsidiary company called Super Radio, which eventually evolved into a network of 850 affiliates and more than 35 different radio shows. Then, during the dot-com boom of the late ’90s, an online start-up called BroadcastAmerica.com approached Garabedian about streaming Open House Party on the Web. "We gave them permission to [broadcast] and we’re on the Internet, and they’re sending us checks every month, and it was lovely," says Garabedian with a deep, throaty laugh Herman Munster would envy. "And then they came to us and said, ‘We’d like you guys to develop a channel. Could you do a channel that shows videos?’ Immediately, my red lights went on flashing."

Garabedian’s experience with V66 had taught him that viewers don’t stay tuned to videos. "The enemy [of V66] was the clicker. People sit there and they’ll click-click-click when a video comes on they don’t like," he says. "They’ll watch one video. ‘Oh, what else is on?’ Click-click-click. And if they find something better, they won’t be back for an hour. When you show a string of videos one right after the other, there is nothing to hold you."

So Garabedian suggested developing an Internet station that would juxtapose music videos with reality programs. BroadcastAmerica.com bit. Garabedian hired a staff, called the project Super V (Super Video), and started filming. "In December of 2000, we started streaming; within months, BroadcastAmerica went bankrupt," he laughs. But enough programming for a 24-hour television station had been created, so Super V continued in hopes of ultimately transferring its shows to a cable provider. "Two things happened," Garabedian says. "One, we developed systems and the shows are really good now. Number two, we built up an archive of shows that can be used for cable on demand."

Eventually, Super V begot XY.tv, a name chosen to show that the channel aimed to reach 12-to-34-year-olds. Demographically speaking, Garabedian thinks the field is wide open: he cites a recent Magner Research study statistic that only four cable stations cater to teens and twentysomethings — MTV, Comedy Central, BET, and Fuse — as justification that the market is ready for XY.tv. "If you want to reach 55-year-old men and women, there are a gazillion places — every channel goes after them," he says. "All the news channels get the men; the fashion, the drama channels get the women. There are so many channels for older people, but not young adults."

The videos XY.tv plays are mainstream pop, plucked from the singles topping the Billboard charts. Even though sixtysomething Garabedian is three times the age of his ideal audience member, the disc jockey claims his video choices reflect his personal taste. "Oldies are for people with psycho sclerosis — hardening of the mind," he declares. "Really. Contemporary music is about now. It’s like the folk music of our time. Who wants to listen to the Beatles? Give me a break! That was 30 years ago, and there are people who still listen to the Beatles. I’d much rather listen to Good Charlotte."