When MTV Cribs premiered 25 years ago, it promised to pull back the curtain on celebrity homes. The series followed in the mold of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which aired from the mid-1980s to the mid-’90s and showcased how the wealthy lived. (It wished its viewers “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”) But MTV’s take had a distinctly informal air: A star welcomed viewers at the front door, then leisurely steered them from room to room, their chatter directed toward a Steadicam-secured camera. These extravagant, often eccentric displays involved living-room jacuzzis, shag carpets, and costly collections—of lingerie, limited-edition sneakers, even tropical fish. The tours also featured more ordinary domestic details, such as unmade beds and the half-eaten contents of refrigerators. The goal, as David Sirulnick, one of the show’s executive producers, said in a 2002 interview, was to demonstrate that celebrities were “just people like everybody else.”
Sticking to this motto helped Cribs walk the line between being relatable and aspirational—an effort that, 25 years later, in an era of hyper-wealth on television, seems almost quaint. Tales of wish fulfillment functioned accordingly: Usher bought the music producer L. A. Reid’s old house, which he’d admired as a child, and Blink-182’s Travis Barker described how he had imagined his pool—embellished with caves and a water slide—in his youth. Through these stories, audiences learned to view extravagant dwellings as not just emblems of individual success but portals into a fantasy life. They served as evidence that, with enough hard work and talent, anyone could achieve their own version of the residential American dream. Across 17 seasons and a handful of spin-offs, Cribs introduced a voyeuristic quality to the now-pervasive “lifestyle as entertainment” genre.
The show’s audience of Millennials, coming of age in an era defined by consumption, learned to take their cues from celebrities. These role models accumulated traditional markers of wealth while also having fun subverting them: In their respective episodes of Cribs, the That ’70s Show actor Wilmer Valderrama highlighted red Solo cups and paper plates on display in a china cabinet, and Missy Elliott gestured to her decorative, seminude Greek statues, remarking, “Naked a-s-s all around the house.” The show featured nouveau riche celebrities who proudly referred to themselves as outsiders; the rapper Juelz Santana was still a “hood dude,” and the record producer Master P claimed that he’d come “from the ghetto.”
These scenes were designed for the average young viewer to enjoy, yet their appeal was offset by their unattainability. Even the celebrities themselves hadn’t always attained Cribs’ vision of the so-called good life. On occasion, the show constructed complete fantasies: Bow Wow and 50 Cent supplemented their car collections with luxury rental vehicles, and the singer JoJo presented her uncle’s lake house as her own. On camera, T-Pain and Missy Elliott admitted to staging their homes—with a frosted cake and a colony of goldfish, respectively—several hours before filming. These contrivances became so well known that, in 2009, the All-American Rejects guitarist Nick Wheeler spent much of his appearance mocking them. “I went down to Enterprise and picked up what they had,” he said, standing beside his Mitsubishi and Mazda sedans, before flaunting his notably sparse kitchen. “I didn’t just do this for Cribs,” he said, evoking an earlier episode in which Kim Kardashian insisted that the cookies on display in her kitchen were homemade, despite their striking resemblance to a popular prepackaged variety.
If the knowledge that people were watching them brought out the jocular humor in some interviewees, it moved others toward self-defense. Travis Barker brandished security cameras, and Snoop Dogg seemed wary of his neighbor, who he said had called the police to shut down his parties on several occasions. Cribs often glamorized the idea of owning private property, even as it demonstrated the hostility it could inspire. As soon as the cameras entered the home of the Backstreet Boys’ AJ McLean, he made a point of closing the front door behind them. “That way, nobody comes in and just starts to sneak around in my house,” he said. Access to the properties on the show was strictly conditional: Viewers were allowed to watch a guided tour, not experience the lifestyle themselves.
The show’s true legacy, in some sense, was to fetishize a distinctly anti-social idea of home: individuals treating their space as a fortress against the outside world. The interior design itself frequently underlined this quality. Stars asserted dominion over their kingdom, their names airbrushed on walls (Bow Wow) and etched into marble floors (Missy Elliott). Personalized amenities—game rooms, theaters, gyms, and, in at least a handful of cases, stripper poles—enabled them to detach from the public altogether. “We don’t have to go out into the city and have a good time—we bring the party to us,” said Usher in one episode, while gesturing to his municipal-size pool.
The secret of Cribs, though, was that even amid its less relatable moments, the show found a way for viewers to feel included in the fantasy: It taught the audience what to consume as well as why they should, by demonstrating how a person’s property—both its literal value and its aesthetic qualities—could define them. Viewers could seek to understand a celebrity’s personality by studying their domestic environment. “The subject of house furnishing is more important than is often realized,” said the Cribs companion book, explicitly articulating this connection:
Everyone is free to change his surroundings. Hence the furniture and the decorations of a house, and the condition of the house and grounds, are properly considered as index to the character of its occupants.
The idea of decor-as-disposition lives on in the show’s many successors. Architectural Digest’s video series Open Door, in particular, sees the rich and famous conduct home tours in a similar fashion to Cribs. Material choices speak loudly, if less ostentatiously: Dining tables are made of reclaimed Venetian planks, and bathtubs are made by Scottish barrel makers. Exclusivity, here, means embracing the bespoke or antique. Exorbitant displays of wealth like those on Cribs are now commonplace. But where the exhibitions on Cribs were charmingly, sometimes garishly, idiosyncratic, today’s represent a subtler and often more generic version of taste.
Perhaps this is why, when revisiting Cribs, I found it endearing—a relic of a time when opulence enhanced eccentricity, amplifying one person’s particular affinities. Today’s lifestyle shows instead hinge on a pristine, editorialized look—as seen on Open Door as well as on real-estate series such as Selling Sunset and HGTV’s home-improvement franchises. Even rookie design enthusiasts posting their budget decor lean toward clean homogeneity. And as the divide between public and private life continues to blur, those who once tuned in to watch others parade around in their luxurious homes now want to be watched themselves. Entry into one another’s homes is no longer exceptional, but expected.
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