The Real World Celebrates 25 Seasons

As The Real World heads into its 25th season, TV Real Weekly talks to Jonathan Murray, the series’ co-creator and chairman of Bunim/Murray Productions, about the show’s legacy.

Tonight on MTV the 25th season of the iconic reality show The Real World kicks off, this time set in Las Vegas, a city defined by pleasure, temptation and youth. The series debuted in 1992, when seven strangers were picked to live together and have their lives taped. The Real World quickly became part of the cultural DNA of young people around the world and has since left an indelible mark on the modern reality-TV genre and pop culture as a whole.

When the series hit the airwaves, it was the first of its kind in the reality programming landscape, says Jonathan Murray, whose Bunim/Murray Productions created the show. "People hadn’t seen anything like this before," he says. "If you think back, at that time there were sitcoms, there were dramas, there were music videos, but then there was this new thing that was somewhere in between."

He adds, "What The Real World did was it commercialized the documentary form. It still focuses on interesting relatable issues, but it does it not by putting the camera on an existing situation, but by creating a situation—by choosing seven diverse people to live together, by choosing the environment that you’re going to place them and art directing that environment and then by lighting that environment so that when you shoot it looks like a high-quality entertainment show."

The core idea that made the show so edgy and groundbreaking in its inception is still at its heart even 25 seasons later, Murray points out. "The original concept was pretty much what it is today: to choose seven diverse individuals, put them in a house together and see what happens. Our feeling was that if you choose diverse people who normally wouldn’t live together, they’re going to have some conflict with each other and they’re going to grow from the experience. That conflict will give us our story arc, and that’s pretty much happened every season. It also at times gives us a lot of humor and a lot of fun. It’s been a very successful format and has remained fresh and relevant."

A few tweaks have been made over the years, but "not much has changed," says Murray. Improvements in lighting and shooting techniques have given the show a more polished look, he says, also pointing to a refining of the editing process. "When we first started it was difficult to find editors who could do this kind of television; there were either documentary editors or there were music-video editors. We needed someone who combined both skills. Today, there’s a whole world of them, partly thanks to The Real World."

Murray says that the reason the show hasn’t changed much is because, quite simply, the format works as is. "Over the years, different people have asked, Do you need to change the show? Every time we looked at it and every time we did research we realized that people just wanted us to focus on the things that make the show great, which is finding great characters, great individuals who bring interesting backgrounds and stories into the house, then to tell those stories with a humorous and dramatic touch. We focused our storytelling on things that were relatable to our audience."

Issues such as sexuality, drug abuse and prejudice have popped up in the story lines, and The Real World has done its best to balance entertainment and social responsibility in addressing these topics with the youth audience. "When you’re shooting for 17 weeks, and you’re shooting people of this age, stuff happens," Murray admits. "Life continues to go on. Life happens and we just have to keep our cameras rolling and be sensitive to the situation."

He says the social issues that the show presents are a direct reflection of the lives of teens and young adults, and have even become a way to start an open dialogue about hot-button issues. "Because casting diverse people is in our DNA, this entertainment show demands that interesting societal issues come into play. We tell them as part of the story. We try to tell them without any judgment and tell them in a way that viewers can decide what they think about them. It’s interesting the conversations some of the things that happen on The Real World have raised in people’s homes or between friends."

Telling these stories is also part of Murray’s focus for maintaining the authenticity of the show, which he says has been key to its continued success. "A lot of what we do with The Real World is very much documentary-like or cinéma vérité-type production. We just cast the seven people and put them in a gorgeous place and shoot it. I think that’s helped the show and has allowed us to build a trusting relationship with the cast so that they feel comfortable being themselves."

The Real World is but one of many successful unscripted series from Bunim/Murray Productions, which last year came under the ownership of Banijay Entertainment. Being part of this larger fold has had a number of benefits, Murray says, including gaining access to a range of international formats and securing distribution of its series and formats within the international marketplace. "There are some good opportunities to strengthen Bunim/Murray by being part of something bigger. What I love about Banijay is that it really allows us to maintain the corporate culture that has made us so successful. Stéphane Courbit, who runs Banijay and ran Endemol France years ago, has created a federation of companies, where we all are able to maintain our own cultures, but at the same time benefit from each other’s help and support."