I'm calling time of death on the Real World franchise. Dec. 3, 2013 is the day the formidable MTV reality series officially croaked and began to roam the Earth as a demon version of its former self, for that is the day the trailer for Season 29 of the Real World: Ex-Plosion was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. The damage, I'm afraid, is complete irreversible.
The video, which introduces us to a new Real World existence that eschews the tried and true formula of finding interesting people with conflicting ideas and interests and forcing them to live and work towards a common goal together and replaces it with cheap tricks and criminally blatant set-ups.
Where the Real World used to introduce us to the housemates' true selves through the simple act of placing them in close quarters, we're now subjected to some sort of Paradise Island spin-off in which the roommates are made to live with their exes and watch them shack up with other people. The result looks something like the drunkest episodes of the Jersey Shore in which there were instances of hair-pulling, clothes-chucking, ear-drum-shattering, and every other sort of trashy behavior we thought we'd gotten out of our systems.
The Real World was supposed to be the one reality show that stayed above the fray, the one that just let people be people (with too much alcohol available to them and producers helping them reach conclusion, of course — we're not that naive). True, it's likely that modern audiences are too trained to expect inane ridiculousness to truly get into the old style Real World.
True, MTV needs to entice audiences somehow. But now that it's come to this, it must be acknowledged for all the youngsters who will henceforth believe this trashy monstrosity is what the Real World is about: The Real World is dead. This zombie version is a rotting corpse of a lie. Enjoy it if you dare, but know that it is a desecration of a once-sacred television series in which a group of people picked to live in a house decided to stop being polite and start getting real.
Image: MTV
