The PPF of MTV's The Real World

It's Wednesday, which, to me, in my sad, TV-centric life, means it's Real World night. I've been thinking about the show, and frankly, there are a lot of underlying economic principles at work that help to optimize the show's entertainment value.

One consideration is that the show's season could be looked at as a big Production Possibilities Frontier in which episodes face trade-offs between comedy and tragedy. Some episodes feature blatant silliness, such as when the male roommates of the house kept putting rats in their musophobic female roommates' beds. Others yet feature absurd ridiculousness, such as when the recently transgendered Katelyn felt like doing a striptease on a pole at a bar. There was only one problem: Katelyn was dancing on an ungreased architectural support pole.

Yet, the show would get old quickly and lose much of its transcendent appeal if it couldn't also hit home with serious issues. One of the most personal and somber episodes featured Ryan, an Iraq veteran, as the show chronicled his introspective reminiscence on September 11th and his struggle with possible post-traumatic stress disorder. Another examined Sarah after she had encountered sexual abuse in her childhood and how that affected her life presently, particularly, her relationship with her father.

Clearly, it's not easy to hit all of these moments in one given episode. The flow would be disjointed and the juxtaposition of raunchy hook-ups and emotional introspection would be too jarring. Therefore, the episode editors face trade-offs as they decide what moments are usable in an episode and which would fail and be ineffective given what they've already produced. Thus, each combination of comedy and tragedy could be viewed as a different point on the season's bowed-out PPF curve.

As an extension of this metaphor, the roommates would act as inputs used in creating the desired outputs. Sure, if the house had eight wise-cracking one-liner masters like Chet, there would be some very funny episodes. But, the show's overall ceiling would be severely limited its inability to capture other tones and more serious moments. Another extreme would be to have eight strong-willed, out-spoken, argumentative personalities like Devyn. Undoubtedly there would be great entertainment as these guests all butted heads, but after two-three episodes of constant shouting and fighting, audiences and ratings would surely wain.

Thus, it is imperative that producers determine the right mix of roommate personalities (inputs) in order to achieve the most entertaining and efficient shows (outputs).