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Had I seen the show beforehand?

Yes: I've seen the the first few seasons of The Real World, though I forget at exactly when I stopped watching.

What did I think of the episode?

It's worth beginning with an important caveat: it is very difficult to find a copy of the series premiere as it originally aired. This is because the original licenses for the soundtrack music don't extend to DVD or streaming versions of the series, something widespread for older TV series. For a sample of how the show aired with what I believe includes the original music, here's a sample clip (which ends with some spoilers from later in the season).

1. "This Is the True Story..." begins to establish one of the most durable new templates for a TV series in recent memory.
   
   The Real World (later renamed Real World) has had over 600 episodes. To be so prolific, you need a really solid idea: something simple enough to be compelling, but versatile enough to allow many variations on a theme. The series takes a diverse group of young people, puts them in a well-furnished building in a big city, then films as much as possible of what they do.
   
   The show also established some important elements beginning with its first season:
   

• The cast is diverse. The show sought to present a broad cross-section of people—or at least broad within the narrow constraint of being a telegenic twenty-something. For the show, diversity served at least two purposes. First, it made it easier for everyone in MTV's audience to find at least one person with whom they could identify. Second, diversity guaranteed conflict amongst the cast members, and nearly all drama requires some element of conflict. Julie, for example noted how she felt a bit overwhelmed because everyone seems to have strong opinions which are deeply held. Sure enough, she'd later have a huge argument with Kevin about racism.
  
• The confessional direct-to-camera interviews became a key tool for the series. A dedicated confessional room wouldn't begin until later seasons, but when we see Norman talking in the bathroom about what he thought of Becky's performance, it's just Norman talking directly to the camera.
  
• The Real World, especially in early seasons, explored a wide range of socially relevant issues, from racism to abortion to the LGBTQ community. For a generation of MTV viewers, The Real World was probably more important in humanizing gay people than most else available in mainstream pop culture at the time. On The Real World, cast members were not merely out but high-profile AIDS activists like Pedro Zamora of season three in San Francisco. The show introduced issues like gay marriage, then on practically nobody's radar, to a wide audience. While the show's position on social issues was clearly socially liberal, its cast members weren't uniformly so. For example, Sean Duffy of season six in Boston is currently a Republican member of the US House of Representatives, and his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, is another politically-active conservative who also appeared on season three.
  
• The show was fascinated by its cast members' romantic and sexual relationships. Some of this was on the abstract level of their viewpoints about such matters, as illustrated in the early scene where Andre is asking Becky and Julie questions from The Book of Questions: Love & Sex. But the show also explored cast members crushes, flirtations, hookups, breakups, heartbreaks, recriminations, and all other permutations of relationships. This would become such a staple of the reality TV genre that it would be common in scripted series about reality TV, like the original version of The Office and its progeny.
  
  

2. The Real World served as an important catalyst to launch an entire television genre.
   
   The Real World wasn't the first series which today would be categorized as reality TV. (For American audiences, one of the higher-profile examples is An American Family, which aired on PBS over two decades before The Real World's premiere.) But it certainly provided a proof-of-concept for much of the modern reality TV genre: there was clearly an audience for this sort of series, and as indicated above, the templates for reality TV series can be incredibly durable.
   
   Even more, reality TV has produced a new category of celebrity, too, often dismissed as "famous for being famous". Keeping Up with the Kardashians may be the best example of this, but it's become common for people to aspire to be reality TV personalities as such. Depending on what you think of shows from Survivor to the Big Brother franchise to the Real Housewives franchise, this may be a fun new form of entertainment or a Harbinger of The End of Civilization Itself™. The genre has certainly become consequential, in any event: consider that the current American president greatly amplified his public profile as a reality TV star.
   
   
3. When considering The Real World today, I'm reminded of the following quote: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
   
   Perhaps this is unfair to The Real World, since it never aspired to be a "movement" in the first place. Nonetheless, it's easy to see over time how the show transformed itself for the worse, I'd argue. For the first season, the entire tone is remarkably earnest. These are people who are curious, who have goals and aspirations outside the loft, and whatever manipulations were made in casting, production, or editing, they're minimal compared to what happens in future seasons. Early seasons were more idealistic, something you definitely see in Julie. She's open and curious, something that's evident even before her flight lands in New York. She's so polite that she thanks a subway operator despite not being given a refund. The height of this expression of idealism, I'd argue, was likely in season three, set in San Francisco. You have political activists on multiple sides of big issues, and a general sense that people wanted to engage in changing the world for what they see as the better.
   
   Of course, season three also became defined by Puck and his constant, unapologetic friction with everyone in the house that led to his inevitable eviction from the house. The producers clearly noticed: bad roommates make for good TV—or at least good ratings. Future casts inevitably were assembled with the goal of finding the next controversial lightning rod. The show deliberately ramped up sources of potential conflict, not least by making alcohol ubiquitous. This may have exacerbated some real-life struggles of its cast members. In season eight in Hawaii, for example, one of the cast members is hospitalized for alcohol poisoning by the end of the season premiere. Addiction eventually claimed the life of Joey, from season twenty in Hollywood. Any show that's twenty-five years old certainly must make room for growth, but it feels that something valuable was lost now that the idealism from a generation ago would feel completely out of place not just on current seasons of The Real World but on much of reality TV itself.
   
   Of course, The Real World isn't the only reality TV series to become increasingly cynical. The scripted series UnREAL, co-created by a former field producer for The Bachelor, gives a wonderfully pulpy exploration of how reality TV producers manipulate events behind the scenes of a fictional Bachelor-like show. For that matter, reality is not the only TV genre to fall into this trap. There's been similar corruption in, say, 24-hour cable news channels, where even politically "neutral" presentations are presented more as mere partisan shouting matches. Any opportunity to inform becomes secondary.
   
   It's hard to summarize a series that's spanned a quarter-century, especially one which helped launch an entire genre. For me, The Real World was worth watching until it started feeling like empty, conspicuous conflict within an increasingly contrived version of "reality". The Real World might never have been truly "real"; even absent overt manipulation, the mere act of knowing you're being filmed will change how you behave. But at its peak, the show was interesting, innovative, and important, and that made it worth watching.
   
   Will you keep watching? Why/why not?
   
   No. I enjoyed early seasons of The Real World, but I'm no longer interested in this show.
   
   [W]hich episode would you recommend to those unsure if they will continue?
   
   It makes sense to watch earlier episodes first, in order to understand the relationships between the roommates and how they evolve. That said, "Julie Thinks Kevin Is a Psycho!" (season 1, episode 11) is particularly memorable. This is one of the first big arguments on the series, especially one whose conflict was as much issue-driven as merely personality-driven.

Psych

Amazon Video | YouTube (Paid)

Shawn Spencer, a man with a photographic memory and amazing logic skills, pretends to be psychic to clear himself of a crime he didn't commit. He convinces the detectives so well that the Police Chief wants to hire him for a case. So Shawn, joined by his best friend Gus, ends up becoming a freelance detective, known as a psychic by the Santa Barbara Police Department.

Psych is an absolutely amazing show, one of my favorites of all time, and this is coming from someone who normally doesn't like crime shows. It has 121 episodes across 8 seasons, but in my opinion it never ever got stale, repetitive. The characters are all great, the pacing is perfect, and the crimes are far-fetched enough to be interesting, but not so much that it's laughable. It ended back in 2014, but it has a movie coming out soon, so I think it would be awesome to introduce it to the subreddit before then!