And so it turns out that the biggest gift would actually be from Jimmy Kimmel.

It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment at which The Real World lost its cultural relevance, but if you were to press us for an answer, we'd have to say it was when the greedy producers at MTV killed their golden goose by launching Real World: Philadelphia less than six weeks after the finale of Real World: San Diego aired. In retrospect, the grand successes of the last truly great RW season were a unfortunate harbinger of things to come for the series as a whole; while the arrests of Brad and Robin made for undeniably great television, it also established a dangerous precedent for the series by making the act of running afoul of the law something for future housemates to aspire to. But we digress — we could talk about this for hours, but we won't. Our point was mainly to say that we haven't watched the Real World in years, and while The Reunion Special / Roast that aired last night had its moments, there was a moment that occured just minutes into the show that, for us, symbolized the de-evolution of the series from a (dare we say) noble social experiment into something that more closely resembles a frat party for community college dropouts.