Recently acquiring yet another streaming platform, Paramount+, I have been watching the shows and movies that have been on my list for some time. One of them: all the season’s of MTV’s Real World. My husband and I watched them when they originally aired, the earliest running in the first few years of our marriage. Most of the cast was a little younger than me, so now they are all in their late 40s or early 50s. Minimizing the Paramount window and letting the show continue to play, I began to Google the seven strangers picked to live in a house of whichever season I was currently rewatching, curious to know what they are doing now. Beyond the lightness and nostalgia of re-viewing the series, it has been interesting to see the casts 30 years ago, then discovering what they look like in 2025, as well as whether or not the country singer made it big or if the woman in medical school still practices the science I saw her study.
When life has led them down a different path, I wanted to know what happened to cause that zig and zag. Mostly, it was like holding up a mirror to myself, to three decades of passing time. If I had been a cast member, what would I have declared my plans to be then versus where I am now, with all the days and weeks in between? At my age, one has a pretty comprehensive knowledge of all the variables that can occur in one’s existence. I was interested to know which of those had touched these people.
Seeing the casts then and now, I attempted to comparatively assess the last 30 years of my own world, if all I had to go by was a Wikipedia result and a few photos. I have no way of knowing what a random April weekday was like for any of them or how many births and deaths have altered their lives forever. But most of us don’t get to 50 without having celebrated and mourned.
For the cast members of cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, London and Chicago, and me at home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, making and watching the show, respectively, our 20s seem idyllic now, despite the stress and pressure of forging a path in our careers finding love, building a family. Those years pale in comparison to those to come, when life stops being polite and starts getting real. And make no mistake, it will. And that is when the true story begins.
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