

For roughly what future Real World cast members would receive for participating in their season’s reunion alone (and a far cry from the hundreds of thousands some reality stars reportedly pull), the cast of MTV’s Real World New York was paid for their entire time on the show that changed television as we know it. In the first episode of the talking-head doc series For Real: The Story of Reality TV, which E! teased Wednesday night (with the full series to follow in March), four members of the original Real World cast reunited and revealed the pittance they were paid—$2,600 in total. They lived together in front of cameras for three months in the winter/spring of 1992.
It’s probably safe to assume that the original ensemble was paid far more for the six-episode reunion series that will premiere on the Paramount+ streamer (rebranded from CBS All Access) when the platform debuts on March 4. The partial reunion that E! aired Wednesday was apparently filmed before the new series—Julie Gentry, Heather B. Gardner, Norman Korpi, and Eric Nies said that they hadn’t been in the same room for some 20 years prior to getting together in front of E!’s cameras for a discussion moderated via satellite by Andy Cohen (who cried after seeing them all reunited).