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Style|How MTV Helped Create the Trump-Era Fame Factory
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/style/mtv-road-rules-theo-von-sean-duffy.html
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Thirty years ago, “Road Rules” sent camera-friendly kids on a first-of-its-kind road trip, turbocharging the reality TV machine that feeds culture today.
Published July 16, 2025Updated July 18, 2025, 10:27 a.m. ET
Attention, as a currency, can work a bit like money itself, creating classes of haves and have-nots. If income inequality in America ballooned in the 1970s, attention inequality got worse in the 1990s — thanks of course to the internet, but also to reality TV.
On “The Real World,” which premiered on MTV in 1992, viewers were invited to surveil the day-to-day of people who were both totally normal and anything but, people finding jobs and facing crushes and doing what 20-somethings do, all while living under one roof. On “Road Rules,” a sister show of sorts that premiered 30 years ago this month, a handful of teens and 20-somethings were dropped into the middle of nowhere in a camper van. There, they performed “challenges” like jumping out of an airplane or spending the night in a supposedly haunted building. The two shows, made by the same production company, essentially ushered in the reality television factory of fame — fleeting and otherwise — as we have come to know it in the decades since.
There is something distinctly American about “Road Rules,” possessed of a berserk energy as if it had emerged from a Hollywood brainstorming lunch between Jack Kerouac and Kim Kardashian. It’s just an R.V. full of young people and the open road. Plus some “challenges” that seem like a real-life test of the parental aphorism “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” The answer is always yes, so long as the tape is running.
Both “The Real World” and “Road Rules” attracted and thrived on a particular personality: obnoxiously authentic. The type of person saying what nobody else will — because it’s rude, offensive, moronic or plainly unnecessary. If that archetype sounds familiar, it’s because reality TV show fame is now actual real-world fame, and we’re living in a world that “Road Rules” made.
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Theo Von, a cast member on Season 9, is now one of the biggest podcast stars in the world, with a show that frequently ranks in YouTube’s Top 10, reaching millions, and which last year counted President Trump as a guest. Sean Duffy, who met his wife on “Road Rules: All Stars,” is the secretary of transportation. Michael Mizanin, now a wrestling star better known as the Miz, was a cast member of “The Real World” and went on the mash-up once known as the “Real World-Road Rules Challenge.”
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