Benjamin Wallace-Wells schreibt, wie sich MTV allgemein und "The Real World" im Besonderen seit der ersten Hälfte der 90er verändert haben [Washington Monthly "Boob Tub"]. Man erfährt u.a.:

After facing declining ratings in the mid-1990s, the network hired executives Van Toffler and Brian Graden to give MTV's programming a facelift: Their brief was to reduce reliance on music videos to increase the ratings among the target young audience. "[In the early '90s] we had influential content, influential music, things were changing, but we had low, low ratings," Judy McGrath, at the time MTV's president, told New York magazine this summer. "Back then, our steady diet was a lot of leading-edge stuff, and not a ton of people were watching."

Und weiter:

MTV has always pursued teenagers; what has changed is the sort of teenagers it is chasing, and what ideal of cool it established to court them. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the network tried to convert its viewers, suggesting to hungry-for-hipness suburban teens that there was something out there cooler and more compelling than their own high school melodramas. The gospel has since changed. What MTV is selling its teen audience now (with "Sorority Life," "Fraternity Life," "Spring Break: Cancun," a more juvenile "Real World") is a bland vision of the immediate future in which the first years of college look pretty much like high school, but without parents or homework. The focus is on having fun, not being challenged by new or different experiences.