This is the true story of two strangers who, on a recent morning, arranged to meet in a loft. The strangers were Edwina Sandys, a British-born artist of illustrious lineage (she is a granddaughter of Winston Churchill), and Chris McCarthy, the president of MTV. The loft was the very one in which, three decades earlier, the first season of the MTV reality show “The Real World” was filmed. Sandys, wearing surprisingly sporty sneakers, is eighty and bespectacled, with flame-red hair. She has lived in the loft, situated on a busy corner of Broadway and Prince Street, since 1995, but had recently decided to put it on the market. (Asking price: seven and a half million dollars.) Before Sandys bid the space farewell, though, McCarthy dropped by to take a look at the location from which American reality television was launched.

“This loft is natural for shooting reality TV, because of the high ceilings,” McCarthy said, the severity of his all-black outfit and shaved head belying his affable manner. “Nowadays, more often than not we end up shooting in old banks.” He gazed seventeen feet up, as if envisioning the cameras that had once been there to capture every move of the seven youngsters—among them Julie, the country bumpkin from Alabama; Kevin, the poet and activist who lived in Harlem; and Eric, the hunk from New Jersey—who fought and made up and fought again in the space. He pointed at a twelve-foot-tall window. “And there’s the fire escape where they used to sit and smoke cigarettes!” he said.

In the “Real World” days, the loft—sixty-five hundred square feet of old-school SoHo grandeur, with cast-iron Corinthian columns, mezzanines, and marble floors—was done up with the signifiers of Gen-X communal living, including a pool table and a lava lamp. Sandys has overlaid the surfaces with colorful Matisse-like canvases and sculptures of her own making. On one wall hangs a portrait of her grandfather in the act of painting, cigar in mouth, homburg aslant.

“Painting relaxed him when he was at home,” Sandys said, in a Queen’s-English burr. “He always allowed us children to be around, which was exciting. His children collected bottles and such for him to make still-lifes from. He called it a bottlescape. This was his favorite champagne,” she said, gesturing toward a painted magnum of Pol Roger.

Sandys is not a professional politician, but through her art she has been concerned with bridging international differences. She directed McCarthy to a photograph that showed Ronald Reagan, in 1990, speaking at a ceremony held in Fulton, Missouri, in which a sculpture of hers—a swath of the Berlin Wall from which two oversized figures, male and female, are cut out—was installed. “It was the town where my grandfather gave his Iron Curtain speech,” she said. “And then Reagan gave the sculpture’s dedication, because he had said to Mr. Gorbachev, ‘Tear down this wall.’ ” Last May, she returned to the site for a commemoration. “I said, ‘I’ve invited thirty lovely young guests to come and show us about peace and freedom,’ and I went behind the wall, and thirty white doves flew out from the cutouts.”

“When the Berlin Wall was coming down, we were launching networks around the world,” McCarthy said. “It’s the spirit of youth, to drive change.” The focus of “The Real World,” he explained, has always been on bringing people together, in spite of their differences. “Now there’s the Internet,” he said. “But, back in the nineties, people would go on the show and it would be the first time they would meet people from different religions, different races.”

“It’s like the United Nations,” Sandys said. “A bit of diplomacy!” Never having seen the show, she asked, “And they live together?”

In June, the network launched three new iterations of the franchise. One is in Atlanta, the second in Mexico, and the third in Thailand, with the latter two airing, for the first time, in the countries’ native languages, with closed captions in English. “The Atlanta one is good,” McCarthy said, “but in America people are familiar with the format, and everyone comes in with a brand.” He went on, “In Thailand and Mexico, though, there aren’t as many unscripted youth shows, so it’s refreshing. You get to see people really acting real.”

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“Will you have people from different parties? Somebody who’s mad keen on Trump and someone who’s not?” Sandys asked.

“That’s what we’re doing in Atlanta,” McCarthy said.

“That’ll be almost like in the Andes, except they don’t eat each other,” Sandys said, with a mischievous smile. She was referring to the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, whose survivors were forced to practice cannibalism. McCarthy looked baffled.

“You know, the Andes? The plane that crashed . . .”

“Oh!” McCarthy said, getting it. “No, hopefully nothing like that!” He laughed nervously.

“I often wonder on a plane; I look around and think, If it crashed—”

“Who looks the tastiest?” McCarthy asked.

“No!” Sandys said. “Which one would I be friends with!” She laughed. “There’s not always a lot.” ♦