Realizing that there’s big money to be made in the field of lurching, unnatural creatures that lumber on when they clearly deserve to be dead, MTV has announced that it’s renewing The Real World for another season. The show is returning to Las Vegas for its 31st season, which, going off of the “Hottest Real World: Las Vegas Hookups” article promoting the new season on MTV.com, will presumably bring viewers the same hard-hitting sociological experimentation that they’ve come to expect from the franchise.
The show’s producers haven’t announced yet whether this year’s show will have any of the mean-spirited twists that characterized recent seasons (like forcing people to live with their exes, or ambushing them with their enemies, in a “Skeletons” season that offered distressingly few instances of people playing music on a xylophone made from someone’s spine.) It’s possible that they’re giving their latest crop of guinea pigs a break, and simply counting on the free-floating fog of gambling losses and broken dreams that pervades Vegas to do the heavy lifting for them, drama-wise.