But by the time I was a senior and forced to write an ugly, unwieldy thesis about medieval theatre, I firmly believed that my brain would simply explode if I tried to wedge one more character-building funless fact in it. So, I got cable.

It was like Dorothy stepping out of her transported house into the land of Oz. Pretty pictures, talking heads, sit-coms, and, thanks to the geniuses at MTV, video. Nirvana. Bliss. Every night I would do my best impersonation of plastic lawn furniture, stacked in front of the teevee.

One miraculous day, quite by accident, I stumbled upon the premiere episode of Real World, the one in New York. Seven strangers picked to live in a loft and have their lives taped...it was conceptually brilliant. Here's what the voyeur in everyone wants, a glimpse into someone else's existence in order to discover that they go through the same kind of crap you do—verité without having to sit through pretentious film school pedantics and grainy black and white.

My friends, however, scoffed. Still do, in fact. "In the real world you have to pay rent," they say. True, and I've never lived in an apartment half as glam as the place the real world kids get, but it's not the physical surroundings that make the show. Real World is all about characters and relationships, not explosions and the supernatural, which may be why it is universally scorned by the television intelligentsia.

And now, almost seven years and seven installments later, I still watch. Not as passionately as I used to, granted. I've gotten a little bit too old to really identify with the early-20s traumas that crop up during the course of the series, but I still love to see the environments and situations that these specimens find themselves in. Road Rules, especially the current series in Latin America, is my new guilty fav, probably due to the unusual adventures more than the psychological development. There's just something vicariously gratifying about watching the six Road Rules strangers overcome their lack of cash and the oddity of the tasks thrown at them—kind of like a primer for the real, real world.

While I'm no longer as addicted to the series as I used to be, I still duck my head a little and mumble about it whenever asked why I have a few of the books. In fact, I wanted to simply die when my husband caught me watching the one of the many cross-promoted out-take tapes, which I had rented in a fit of silliness from our local Blockbuster. It was as if I were doing something highly sleazy, like checking out Deep Throat or When Animals Attack, Part 3, rather than a simple-yet-inspired MTV product that has become part of our collective subconscious.