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Reality television may be the sole exception.

Arguably the schlockiest genre in the history of pop culture goo, reality television somehow provokes the most divisive discussions. Go ahead: ask someone what he or she thinks of Real Housewives, and you’ll likely get one of two responses. The first is an impassioned critique of a character. And there’s nothing wrong with a glowing paean to NeNe, but this frothy response isn’t particularly interesting—it’s the contemporary equivalent of saying Madame Bovary had it coming.

The more likely response will be something along the lines of “I hate, hate, hate reality television.” Notice your interlocutor didn’t say “I hate that show.” Rather, she waved her Ginzu at the entire genre. No one bothers to vocalize their disgust of, say, mystery novels, but invoking reality television is like opening the guffaw box. It’s the universal polarizer.

To find out why, don’t stop there. Continue with questions: “Why the hate?”

The answer is almost invariably some version of “because it’s fake.”

Ah yes, the fakery.

“I thought, this is never gonna happen, this is not going to happen, they can’t do this to seven people.”

That’s Eric Nies, uttering the first words on the first episode of the first season of what many consider the first reality TV show, The Real World. It is the summer of 1992. This show is set in New York City, but I am in the deep Midwest, where I was born and raised, and where I could only imagine probably dying.

Growing up in the middle of nowhere, before the Internet, I had no understanding of the size of cultural events. For all I knew, Bruce Springsteen could have been an obscure singer-songwriter and the Pixies could have been playing stadiums. So I didn’t understand whether The Real World was actually significant, but it certainly felt like the most important thing to happen to me in 1992. I was in college, but it was the first time in my life that I could imagine being somewhere else.

I lived with my kinda-best friend that summer. We were both taking classes at the University of North Dakota. His name was Chuck and he was probably the only person alive who was more obsessed with The Real World than me. We adopted the show’s motto, “When people stop being polite and start getting real” as our own.

“Real,” to us, meant arguing about everything.

If you believe that television has any influence over us, then you must sometimes wonder how the worldviews of people raised on The Brady Bunch and Dallas differ from those weaned on Survivor and The Real World.

And if you believe these shows can affect our personalities, then you must wonder whether the narratives of reality television bleed over into our behaviors.

And if you believe they can, then it seems logical to conclude that we are doomed to repeat these plots in our daily lives.

With that bleak conclusion, allow me to ruin the plot of every episode of every reality-based drama on television:

Person A says something to Person B about Person C. Person B then recounts the conversation to Person C (“that bitch, Person A!”), except it doesn’t sound exactly like what Person X (that’s you!) heard. Person C then asks Person D if she should confront Person A about what she told Person B. Person D always says yes—confront! By the time that Person C confronts Person A, Person X has heard the story several times, but it keeps changing with each telling. By the end of the episode, Person X has completely forgotten what exactly Person A said to Person B, which is peculiar because Person X, like all the cast members, seems to overlook that this show is videotaped.

This is surprisingly similar to modern life.

Fifteen years after the first episode of The Real World, that same kinda-best friend from college published a semi-famous essay that described the summer we lived together. Still available in Urban Outfitters across the country (in a memoir called Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs—my roomie Chuck had become the writer Chuck Klosterman), the essay became pervasive