The Unreality of MTV's The Real World

The Unreality of MTV's The Real World

“This is the true story, of seven strangers, picked to live in a house, and have their lives taped, to find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting real”(MTV). This marks the beginning of MTV’s reality show, The Real World. The show takes 7 strangers, puts them in a trendy luxurious home, taping them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for about 4 months. The cameras capture petty arguments, late night hook ups, and pure laziness. How could this not be real? There are not many people that can live in an expensive home while laying around all day, and partying all night with little work involved. The Real World is a display of 18-24 year olds, typecasted to have their most extreme stereotypical qualities blown out of proportion for the world to see.

The Real World gives the viewer a false outlook on life. Sure there are a select few that have the opportunity to live lavishly with little to no responsibilities, but that is a small percentage. The show depicts the cast lounging around in their up scale home all day, then going out to amazing night clubs drinking enormous amounts of alcohol through out the night. Many of the cast members wake up in the afternoon hours only to repeat this process. In reality the world does not work like this. Many people have to work one to three jobs just to get by leaving no room for lounging and bar hopping.

The show is geared towards teens and college students, filling their heads with false outlooks on life. Not only does it depict laziness, it is a good display of immoral behavior.“Advertising and movies send kids the message that smoking and drinking make a person sexy or cool and that everyone does it”(AAP). In almost every episode there are hook ups, or confessions of wanting to sleep with a roommate. The show puts all 18-24 year olds in the “party” category, even though not everyone is like that.

Stereotypically, young adults are supposed to be lazy, party animals unsure about their future. I feel there are many more young adults taking the academic route, trying to make a good future for themselves. The majority of The Real World cast members are put into a mold. The producers will not admit doing this, but the cast members turn into characters throughout the show. If you look at past seasons there is always the gay person, ethn...

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...ws. How real can you get when you are not even seeing their whole stay. Many of the episodes are different scenes just blended together, you could be watching a scene from the first two weeks of their stay along with one from the last two weeks of their stay and not even know it.

The Real World is not a good learning tool unless you are wanting to know how to stereotype people. This show will fill your head false preconceptions of a group of individuals. There are already enough discriminatory problems in the world today, why make it worse? If you want to know how to be lazy all day and party all night, watch The Real World. If you want to fill your head with false hopes and dreams of living in luxury with out working a real job, watch The Real World. Do you want your children thinking it is ok to party or hook up with random people? The Real World needs to start putting real people on their shows and stop creating characters based on how society views a group of people.

Works Cited

Berkowitz, Carol. American Academy of Pediatrics: Dedicated to the Health of all Children. American Academy of Pediatrics. 8 Dec. 2004

MTV Networks. The Real World. 8 Dec. 2004