Remember Ashley and Erika from The Real World D.C.? No? Yeah, you shouldn’t.Our sister site Gothamist went and made us feel old by letting us know that it was on this very day 20 years ago that MTV’s seminal reality show The Real World first aired. Then based in New York, the intervening 27 seasons have taken the show to cities across the country—and now, to St. Thomas.
It was in mid-2009 that D.C. finally got its own installment of The Real World, based out of a large house on 20th Street in Dupont Circle. When it aired in early 2010, we faithfully watched every drunken trip to Third Edition, every awkward sexual predator-like insinuation by panda hat-wearing Andrew, Josh’s every attempt at rock stardom (Wicked Liquid!), and the few times that The Real World D.C. came into contact with real D.C. (and the lawsuits that usually resulted), and we can authoritatively say this—it may well have been the single worst Real World in the entire franchise. We weren’t even second-tier—this was straight up 28th-tier terrible.
There’s probably no better symbol for what The Real World D.C. was than what the house where it took place turned into—a museum that seeks to confront the legacy of forced labor prisons in China. It’s hard to say it, but forced labor is easier to stomach than terrible location-based reality TV.
Martin Austermuhle