re: MTV Cribs was 100% fake

A couple I know was asked if a TV show could use them and their house to install solar shingles. At the end of the episode, the contractors came back “three months later” to check on things, and of course the owners said their electric bill was way less. In reality, the whole thing was filmed in a couple of days.

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I'm not trying to be mean here, but how would a sane person ever believe it's real?

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I think some of the episodes were real because they matched the homes that the people actually lived in and have been shown on their own TV shows.

No, it certainly plausible, but the majority of them were fake.

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It all started with the Osbourne show around 2000. It was downhill after that

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The Real World was the beginning of the end... MTV never actually had good ratings, because people changed the channel when they didn't like the song that came on, or when the playlist started over in an hour and they were tired of the songs/vids. Eventually, that meant that advertising started to suffer when people just got over the perceived coolness of it all. The focused shows (TRL, Yo! MTV Raps, etc) did better because they drew in one audience that stayed for the length of the show. But when the Network did The Real World and its Road Rules spin-off, they discovered - unlike the timely music shows - that they could show marathons of the reruns and hold an audience... people would tune in and stay for hours and hours. So the more of these cheap and easy to produce shows they made, quickly, the more they could fill the airtime with it and bring the ratings up and do much better selling advertising time around them. At least at VH-1 it was "Behind The Music" that took over at first, which was still music-centered.

Anytime I've looked at MTV in the channel guide of my TV in the past few years it's always the show Catfished... all day, all night, all-the-time.

And a few of the Cribs episodes were the real houses... Redman and Master P, as noted... Big Boi's actual macmansion in Atlanta... the actor Jerry O'Connell and his brother and their modest duplex in L.A.,,, and, hilariously, former VJ turned actor Simon Rex, who lived in a very modest kind of run down hill side house and showed off his car collection... ("This is the town car... she's a Camry... and this is the truck (older, banged up Toyota mini-truck without hubcaps)... yeah, she's riding on 15's...")

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Not all of these were fake. I feel like this is easy to confirm

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There was some "controversy" when the show was on the air when people noticed that some established musicians and actors lived in very nice but relatively "normal-sized" houses, and some of the new rock musicians just lived in nice normal houses in middle-class suburbs...

while brand new rappers with one or two hits lived like billionaires. So obviously some exaggerations were suspected, or some questionable over-extension of credit lines and general irresponsibility. My gf at the time worked in video production and worked on some of the episodes done in LA and TX. The production crew people told her a lot of the rappers episodes were fake... some of the houses belonged to the people who owned their record labels, some of them the rappers were renting (from people like the people who owned their recold labels), and some where just rented for the show.

She said they talked about how if a new rapper is not projecting an image like they have millions they aren't seen as legit... while for some new rock or country singers it is the opposite, the fans don't want to see them as being much better off than they are until they feel like they've earned it, so they can't live large right out of the gate and in some instances actually shot things at smaller houses/apartments than their actual residences to give the desired vibe.

I didnt mind them doing road rules and real world. They mixed it in with music, which still dominated the channel. Now it has basically zero to do with music. Sad day to see the way MTV has gone.

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I’m not surprised that some of it was fake. But that video is mostly hearsay from literal random people on the internet. Like the Ying Yang Twins one where it’s random people saying “you know that’s some old white couple’s house.”

Now I’m not saying that was the YYT’s house but that proves nothing when you’re just quoting random tweets as “evidence.”

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They also rent(ed) a lot of their housing, for their real lives. So I'm sure a lot of it was fake and some of it wasn't and it just depends on the episode in question.

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The Real World was the beginning of the end

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The Real World may have been the beginning of the end, but it debuted in 1992 (Road Rules in 1995). The era of reality shiftiness was a decade later, in the 00s.

MTV actually produced a lot of great non-music TV in the 90s. Beavis and Butthead, Daria, Liquid Television, The State, True Life, Singled Out, Loveline, The Tom Green Show, The Head, The Maxx, etc.

History of MTV Programming

Just look at the explosion of shite in the 00s.

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The real thing to think about is how many high profile celebs were ok with lying and being complete frauds, misrepresenting themselves on that show. And if they were willing to do it for something as pointless as cribs, what else do they do it for

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Are you an alien who just came to earth and started observing humans?

This has been a thing since Sumer

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MTV Cribs was 100% fake

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