MTV Cribs Makes Its Instagram-Era Comeback

Before there was Instagram, there was “MTV Cribs.”

These days, the internet is crowded with photos of pajama-clad celebrities lounging in their bedrooms. But when “Cribs” made its debut in 2000, the unscripted television show was one of the few ways fans could get a peek inside stars’ homes. MTV’s take on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” “Cribs” featured celebrities from Snoop Dogg to Mariah Carey giving self-narrated tours of their blinged-out homes.

Now, two decades after its original release, “Cribs” is back with a new season, which premiered Aug. 11.

“ ‘Cribs’ was the blueprint for these real-estate shows and for celebreality, for the genre,” said the show’s creator, MTV executive Nina L. Diaz. One of the reasons for bringing the show back, she said, is that the public’s appetite for real-estate voyeurism has only grown since the original “Cribs” went off the air in 2010. “People just crave [seeing] how others live, and how the other half lives,” she said. At its peak, during Season 4 in 2002, the show averaged 1.6 million viewers per episode.

This season, viewers will get a tour of Martha Stewart’s 156-acre horse farm in Katonah, N.Y., where the sweater-clad lifestyle guru explains that there are seven houses on the property, along with three horses, 150 chickens and 14 blue canaries. In rapper Big Sean’s seven-bedroom, Mediterranean-style home in Los Angeles, there is a secret nightclub he inherited from the previous inhabitant, Slash of Guns N’ Roses. T.J. Lavin, the BMX rider and host of MTV’s “The Challenge,” shows “Cribs” viewers his backyard full of bike jumps.