For many who tuned into MTV’s Real World in its early days, they remember cast members such as Pedro Zamora, an AIDS activist, asking for a dose of privacy on his first date with his eventual life partner. The end of that season’s broadcast created a significant media moment with Zamora’s passing just hours afterward. Memories such as this felt visceral and honest. You can even say real, unprecedented and unscripted. Leap into 2008, sixteen years after the show’s debut, and the cultural content of The Real World has become ordinary cultural miasma. As a contrast to this, the interior design concept of the Hollywood season has evolved.

The show casts and targets teenagers and young adults. As many viewers mature, a new set comes of age to replace them. Like the David Wooderson character in Dazed and Confused says,” That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” 

Show producers have stuck to a formula of casting young attractive people whom are directionless and rather limited in experience but with an overabundance of aggression. There are cast binge drinking problems and female members experiencing the angst of unrequited affection for fellow beefcakes. To many viewers, nothing unusual has happened this last season. It’s the same dysfunctional behavior happening in the foreground.

In an attempt to evolve into a real model of cultural growth, production designers enlisted multiple companies to help develop a green interior concept for the Hollywood home. The lighting industry’s TCP Inc. provided advice along with hundreds of energy-efficient compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs for the set. Other manufacturers provided Energy Star appliances, bamboo flooring, solar energy panels and the now ubiquitous, hot tub, albeit one solar-powered.

“This is the true story... of seven strangers... picked to live in a house...work together and have their lives taped... to find out what happens... when people stop being polite... and start getting real...The Real World.”

And this is what happens, when green becomes a normal back-drop for entertainment.