ideas for The Real World were directly derived from his television show Nummer 28, which aired in 1991 on Dutch television. Bunim/Murray decided upon the cheaper idea of casting a bunch of "regular people" to live in an apartment and taping their day-to-day lives, believing seven diverse people would have enough of a basis upon which to interact without scripts. The production cast seven cast members from 500 applicants, paying them $2,600 for their time on the show. The production discovered a nine-story, ten-unit residential co-op building at 565 Broadway, at the corner of Prince Street, in Manhattan's SoHo district, after much searching, and converted the massive, 4000-square-foot duplex to be the residence and filming location. Walls separating two adjacent apartments on the second and third floors were removed in order to form a single , four bedroom residence, and were renovated for the filming of the series. Production personnel, which included up to 13 people at one time, utilized a work space with a separate entrance. The cast lived in the loft from February 16 to May 18, 1992. The series premiered three days later, on May 21, 1992. Critical reception At the time of its initial airing, reviews of the show were mostly negative. Matt Roush, writing in USA Today, characterized the show as "painfully bogus", and a cynical and exploitative new low in television, commenting, "Watching The Real World, which fails as documentary (too phony) and as entertainment (too dull), it's hard to tell who's using who more." The Washington Post's Tom Shales commented, "Ah to be young, cute, and stupid, and to have too much free time...Such is the lot facing the wayward wastrels of The Real World, something new in excruciating torture from the busy minds at MTV." Shales also remarked upon the cast members’ creative career choices, saying, "You might want to think about getting a real job." Nonetheless, the series was a hit with viewers, and the initial seasons have come to be reassessed. Writing in 2011, Meredith Blake of The A.V. Club found the cast to be "ambitious, articulate, and thoughtful". Though she conceded that nearly all of the cast were pursuing careers as performers, and thus had ulterior motives for appearing on the show, she found their motivations "relatively noble" compared to that of later participants in reality TV shows, many of whom wanted simply to become famous by appearing on