The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME

"First, I apologize. I know I left some of your favorite shows off this list. How do I know that? Because I left some of my favorite shows off this list. The happy and unfortunate fact is that there are far more than 100 great shows, and more created every year. Lists are incredibly important: they are how we define what matters to us, what we want entertainment and art to do, what we expect of our culture."
—TIME TV critic James Poniewozik

The Real World

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Before it became a college internship in binge drinking and casual sex, this ur-reality show was an actual interesting social experiment—if not the kind it was advertised as. No, it was not really about what happened when seven kids living under cameras "start[ed] getting real."(That's why it was all the more arresting in season 3 when actual reality intruded on the show in the form of AIDS activist Pedro Zamora, who died soon after the season aired.) It's about performance, and young people's complicated relationship with authenticity and privacy in the Internet age. Survivor added a million-dollar giveaway to the concept, but in The Real World—as in Laguna Beach, and for that matter, nearly every MTV reality show since— attention itself is the prize.