HOT TYPE.

Reality shows exploit dubious myths by turning them into contests--you really can lose thirty pounds, snow a billionaire into giving you a dream job, win the cheerleader's heart with a rose. Simply assemble the cast from a Benetton ad, serve drinks, and start removing the chairs. Someone will always emerge triumphant. MTV's "I'm from Rolling Stone" applies this durable formula to six twentyish writers who intern at the magazine for a summer, competing for a one-year contract as a contributing editor. The two music-culture manufactories seem to have devised the program to preserve the bewhiskered legend that they still hire, and chronicle, raw youths.

In the sixties and the early seventies, Rolling Stone actually did work something like that. The critics Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs broke into the magazine in their early twenties, and Cameron Crowe was only sixteen when the editors sent him on the road with the Allman Brothers Band--an episode that inspired Crowe's 2000 film "Almost Famous."

Nowadays, Rolling Stone is a grown-up business, one whose non-camera-ready interns are in the office making photocopies while the "interns" are out covering Lollapalooza. Despite this rickety foundation, however, the show holds together, because the kids, selected from more than two thousand applicants, are touchingly optimistic--they don't know they're working for the man. Some of them seem to believe that their responsibilities will include jamming about poverty in Africa with Bono and then addressing the global situation in an all-night writing marathon fuelled by mescaline and unchained id. (That's how I do it, but then I'm a seasoned professional.) Others have no idea what's going on. Pete, the beer-pounding Australian crew jock, has barely written anything before; Tika, the self-satisfied African-American lesbian, loses her notebook while writing her first piece; and when Krishtine, the grill-wearing Asian-American hip-hop sprite, gets the you're-in phone call from the magazine's founder and editor, Jann Wenner, she might as well be talking to Archduke Ferdinand.

KRISHTINE: I'm so excited! Ian, is it? Ian?, JANN: Jann., KRISHTINE: Jann?, JANN: Jann., KRISHTINE: Spell it for me.

Krystal, an attractive blond poet, is the only one who really seems to know the magazine, at least as it was in the days when Annie Leibovitz spent weeks on the road photographing the Stones (and doing drugs with them, as Wenner rather meanly suggested in a recent "American Masters" about Leibovitz on PBS). When Krystal leaves her sepulchral boyfriend behind in Salinas--forever, it seems clear--she jokes about running off with Steven Tyler, and in a video Q. & A. posted on rollingstone.com she talks about hoping to party with Keith Richards. When Slug, the front man of Atmosphere, tells Krystal, "I totally want to make out with you," her coy laugh suggests, Well, you're not a legend like Keith Richards--you couldn't be my grandfather--but, then again . . . No one seems to have got the memo about sucking face with your subjects.

The interns haven't yet learned to keep their distance, to pigeonhole the work with insidery adjectives (duff, proggy, already dated), and then to award it a safe three stars; they're thrilled to be allowed onstage, punching their fists in the air at song's end. Their cluelessness induces nostalgia: this is what life was like before we were trammelled by BlackBerries and the knowledge of why Jann Wenner mattered.

Colin, a long-haired nineteen-year-old from Eugene, Oregon, is the most wide-eyed--the sort of guy who's inadvertently left behind in the chill-out tent when the van leaves. When he interviews We Are Scientists, he arrives completely unprepared, grasps his pen like a garden tool, and finally mumbles to the lead singer, "I think I have that shirt, actually." After an editor questions the use of "Boho" in his report, he says, "Isn't that short for Brooklyn, or something?" We root for Colin to figure it out, hoping that figuring it out doesn't, this once, amount to some form of selling ...