What happens when people stop being polite and start getting real (all up in our backyard)? We're about to find out when the 29th season (that's not a typo) of The Real World premieres in early 2014. As you probably already know, seven wild and crazy kids have been fighting outside of bars, waiting for the bus, and playing sandbag games in Dolores Park for the past two months, but what was just announced this week is that the format is changing: the cast members will live in the house for a month, go away on a day trip, and return to find their exes have moved in! Contrived drama at its worst. To add insult to injury, the show has been re-coined The Real World: Ex-Plosion. (That rumble you feel is not an earthquake, but Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath and every other person who has ever respected the English language rolling in their graves).
In all honesty, I planned to watch this season after a decade-long sabbatical from the Real World series, mainly to see what was happening in the background of the boozy confessions and betrayals (I know that DJ! I used to live on that street! Is that me?!?). But this shameless gimmick is just too much to handle; a stunt like this would make sense in Las Vegas (the first season in that city was all about breaking up and making up), but to return to San Francisco where in 1993, Pedro Zamora taught the world (and even Bill Clinton) about what it's like to live with HIV, is sacrilege, an erasure of the years when the program was actually an illuminating sociological experiment. This is the result of staying at the party so long that you wake up there the next afternoon. It's embarrassing.
Sir Newton declared that "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Since MTV has put this toxic offering into the world, I feel it is my duty to make a counterbalance...by casting the only cast of exes worthy of living together on a television show.
Winona Ryder & Johnny Depp
