[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Real World Homecoming: Los Angeles premiere “It’s Still Not Funny.”]
Beth Anthony, Beth Stolarczyk, David Edwards, Glen Naessens, Irene Berrera-Kearns, Jon Brennan, and Tami Roman return to the iconic Venice beach house from their season of The Real World, the series’ second in 1993, in the Paramount+ reunion, and it doesn’t take long for them to start getting real … again. And for those tuning in to see what happens when Tami and David are in a room together again, given what happened that led to him getting kicked out of the house, fortunately, you don’t have to wait long.
Back during their original season of The Real World, as shown quite a few times during the premiere, David pulled the blanket off that Tami was using to cover herself. As a result, he became the first person to be kicked off a reality show. Now, Tami’s willing to welcome him into the house. After all, she has unfinished business with him and sees this as an opportunity to tell him what she was going through at the time. David, on the other hand, thinks that he‘s the one owed an apology … so you can imagine the DRAMA coming.
An incoming message for the roommates starts it off: “Living with strangers mean testing each other’s limits, learning to respect boundaries. It also means learning that sometimes jokes are no laughing matter.” With that, footage of what happened plays, and David’s smiling while watching it. After, he shrugs and laughs it off. Irene admits she feels sick watching it because of what she didn’t do at the time, and Jon is embarrassed he was part of it. But David argues that everyone’s having a good time and points out Jon’s involvement.
“For me, when I watch that, I still get angry because if I say that I got no clothes on, then nobody should have tried to pull the covers off,” Tami explains. “People don’t understand that laughter is sometimes to cover uncomfortableness and awkwardness and they don’t know what to do and that kind of what was happening in that moment for me. Without you guys knowing who I am, what I was dealing with, even while we were shooting this show, then you can’t understand the magnitude of why I was like don’t pull these damn covers off me.”
Bunim-Murray Productions/courtesy Everett Collection
Then she explains what they hadn’t seen when they were roommates in ’93. “In my personal life, you all did not see me popping laxatives. You all did not hear me throwing up. Y’all did not know that I was battling body dysmorphia. Nobody understood why I got my mouth wired. It was because I’m a person who, no matter when I look at myself, I feel like I’m 300 pounds,” she says.
“I was humiliated, I felt disrespected, I was vulnerable in a way that I didn’t want to be and I was uncomfortable. I’m willing now to give you a pass on that,” Tami tells David. But he doesn’t want that pass, he says, arguing, he wasn’t the only one pulling the blanket and everyone was laughing. In fact, he makes Tami sit there and watch the video again and laughs as it plays.
“That’s not funny,” she says, and the others agree with her. “With the way he’s laughing, it makes him look stupid,” Irene says. “I literally felt my face getting hot. I just wanted to just go up to him and just smack him in the face and say, ‘Shut up. There are people right now in this room who do not like what’s up on this screen right now, and you’re laughing at it.’”
David continues to try to turn it around on Tami — “I’m being blamed for mental problems I didn’t even know you had” — but as she repeatedly tells him, “it’s still not funny.” With that, she walks out. Will history repeat itself and David get kicked out again?
Meanwhile, Aaron Behle and Dominic Griffin aren’t back for the reunion. Beth S. keeps in touch with Dominic and says he didn’t feel comfortable coming back. Jon talked to Aaron for the first time in years to find out if he was returning, and “he said there’s no way.” Jon understands; his experience on The Real World was a positive one, but it was different for everyone. “Having been on a reality show wasn’t something they wanted to be known for or revisit,” Jon says. “When a grown adult says, ‘Hey, I don’t want to do this, I hope it goes well for you,’ you have to respect that.”
The Real World Homecoming: Los Angeles, Wednesdays, Paramount+