The Real World: Key West
season of television series
The Real World: Key West is the seventeenth season of MTV's reality television series The Real World, which focuses on a group of diverse strangers living together for several months in a different city each season, as cameras follow their lives and interpersonal relationships. It is the second season of The Real World to be filmed in the South Atlantic States region of the United States, specifically in Florida after The Real World: Miami.
The season featured seven people and was shot in the Key Haven neighborhood of Key West, Florida from August to December 2005. It premiered on February 28, 2006, and consisted of 25 episodes. The season premiere was viewed by 3.33 million people.
In 2019, the season was made available for streaming on Facebook Watch (alongside the sixteenth and twenty-eighth seasons) ahead of The Real World: Atlanta's premiere.
Production
The production faced a lawsuit by tourism mogul Ed Swift, a neighbor to the Driftwood Drive house, who sought to stop filming at the location, on the grounds that the production's floodlights, commercial-sized air conditioners, and outdoor cameras capable of rotating towards his house were a nuisance, and that local zoning laws prohibit commercial use of Key Haven homes. After MTV threatened to cancel production in response to the lawsuit, a judge threw out the lawsuit and allowed Bunim-Murray Productions to continue filming the season, with some minor production restrictions put in place.
During filming, Hurricane Rita made landfall, forcing the cast to evacuate to West Palm Beach. Subsequently, Wilma hit the area, forcing them to evacuate again, first to Ft.
“The Real World: Key West” enters the record as season of television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Real, World and West can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Real World: Key West” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Real, World and West provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7759662. Authority coordinates are 24.587, -81.738. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2006 and 2019.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “The Real World: Key West”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow The Real World: Key West primary sources, The Real World: Key West archive and Real research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The Real World: Key West”?
- Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
- How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “The Real World: Key West” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.