What is the single most influential sentence written for television in the last 25 years? Here’s my nominee: “This is the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a loft and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.” For viewers of a certain age, the word “taped” alone should strum a chord of nostalgia. In the spring of 1992, those words opened the first episode of the first season of MTV’s The Real World — reality TV before air quotes and billions of dollars in revenue got draped around the phrase. Some critics, who had no idea that a revolution was beginning, dismissed the series as “painfully bogus” and “excruciating torture,” while the New York Times called it “the year’s most riveting television.”

It turned out to be a very short leap from seven strangers picked to live in a loft to 16 strangers picked to compete on an island. And it has been a very steep plunge from there to the September 7 premiere of Fox’s Utopia, the self-described “social experiment” that marks the first of fall’s new network series and, barring a turnaround that just isn’t gonna happen, the season’s first large-scale disaster.