The Real World. Passing Me By. Sigh.

It's tough to ask anybody to take The Real World too seriously, but I've wondered several times before if the show did itself a favor by turning into, basically, The Jersey Shore, when in fact it started out as a somewhat ambitious experiment that went really, really well.

And thankfully, someone else has volunteered to watch the entire first season, so we don't have to:

Going into this, my hypothesis was that The Real World was once a more realistic and thought-provoking program than it's become. I was right. From Season 1 to Season 25, we've traded discussions of actual social issues for slapping fights and Jell-O shots. In the process, the show's also gotten a whole lot more fun.

Maybe I'm a child of my generation, pre-conditioned to like my reality TV with a heavy dose of cat fights. Or maybe that's just better television. In either case, if we're going to mourn the loss of nuanced discussions of social issues, we should probably start with the nightly news, not MTV. Maybe today's MTV is on to something with its whole "watch seven teenage idiots get drunk, grope each other, and punch things" approach. While the premise of watching real life on TV might sound interesting, in practice, it's pretty dull. 

Maybe I'm just an old codger compared to the writer, maybe I'm just a pathetic "back in my day..." guy.  But the current, "fun" Real World isn't fun to me at all - it's the equivalent of standing in a packed-to-the-gills club while the music is so loud nobody can talk to each other.  I'm a guy that wants the quiet, mostly-empty bar where I can talk to my friends.

Oh yeah - and this Mrs. Xmastime from the Chicago cast was a whore.