How Real World Casts People, Decorates Its Houses, Makes the Challenge

Producers are over frat boys for the moment. "We looked at the [past several seasons] and decided we've had too many kids who are suburban middle class, who went to college," Murray says. "We set out to find more blue-collar people, from families who had to struggle and who had to struggle themselves. This season, we have Tony, who works at a chemical plant, and Jason, who had just lost his job at a car dealership when we cast him."

The first Real World (set in New York City) was kind of a production s—tshow. "We had no idea what we were getting into. We foolishly thought everyone would go to bed at the same time. That didn't happen. We had this meager little crew trying to cover seven individuals who were all over the place. Everyone was shell-shocked by the end of the experience."

The job aspect of the show originated in London, when the cast got shy. "Our American cast members didn't know what to do with themselves in London. We needed to get them out of the house, meeting people. That's when we introduced the idea of the job."

Turning to spin-offs for a sec: a ton of strategizing goes into those Challenge competitions. "We aim for a mixture of challenges that have adrenaline, humor, and a death-defying component," Murray says. (And skin-baring potential: Murray's perfect challenge, he says, involved male-female couples wringing honey out of each other's clothes.) "We have a Challenge team that's been developing these games for several years, and we have stunt and safety people who test them," Murray says. "We can't have too many people test each challenge because of the insurance costs."

And, yes, Road Rules fans: He's open to a revival of the franchise. "I would love to bring back Road Rules. Would you please start some kind of campaign?"

If you've ever wondered how they handle shooting what happens when, um, people stop being polite and start getting real, so to speak... Filming the cast members' hookups is a delicate art involving a lot of trust and good editing. "If there's a camera person in the room when two people start getting heavy, the camera person will stay just long enough to establish what's going on," Murray says. "Then they move out. But we do have surveillance cameras that stay on. That's why you see go everyone under the covers. The cast knows we're not going to show this stuff—MTV restricts us from showing things like thrusting."

Communication used to be a hazard to the drama. Now producers use it to their advantage. "The roommates know they're not supposed to talk to the outside world about what's going on," Murray says, who adds that producers monitor everything roommates do on the Internet while they're in the house. "But last season we decided to start giving them a phone when they went out. They were allowed to shoot video and post pictures online. We knew that if they were posting pics of them meeting someone, and an ex saw, that ex would have a question for them the moment they walked in."