MTV's "The Hills" Was Never Real, Was It?
Reviewing the pre-influencer social media series 15 years after its finale
The Hills filmed its first season in 2005. When it debuted on May 31, 2006, it was the background noise I half watched as I did my university class homework. Yeah, summer school, leading into the fall semester. Me.
The girls, Lauren Conrad, Heidi Montag, Whitney Port, Audrina Patridge, and a mix of pals, pretended to work full duties as they really, clearly did not off camera according to gossip, and to my eyes then and now. Internships at Teen Vogue and other glam spots in a pre-social media flamed Hollywood setting were Instagram drooling for people before Instagram. Bored young people didn’t have a place to get the LA visuals fix. There you go. Instant SoCal aesthetic. The lifestyle. Clothes. Beach.
I wasn’t jealous. It felt like a healthy alternative to the media hating on young women 24/7. Until. Spencer Pratt, Heidi’s boyfriend planted adult tape gossip about Lauren. I forgot he existed. Did you? There was a time every magazine at a doctor’s office had those two in it. Or Lauren on the cover.
Looking back on this, I never paid full attention to the show. Overhearing it between homework or sleepy nights curing my insomnia before school was enough for me to follow along. Because if I had, like I did in my late 30’s, the invisible plot held together by Lauren Conrad’s headbands and winged eyeliner she practically slept in during filming, so it seems to me, no sarcasm, would have been rougher on me as a viewer.
The fake-ality series holds a pumped up vision of everyday young women making it in the big city until the Spencer-Heidi fallout over the tape gossip. From that moment onwards, the show doesn’t pretend it’s about friendship or being the only show on television positively portraying young women seeking careers. Some version of it goes, “I hate Spencer for what he did. No way am I talking to Heidi.” The producers get Lauren to leave home. Heidi by magic coincidence happens to be there. They don’t talk, or they do, and tears fall. How tears fall so hard, so often on the series for someone you never dated, well, you might think Lauren and Heidi did go out from all of that. My feeling is producers threw in artificial tears drops or some sort of itch to get that going theatrically. Everyone cries on this series.
Lauren is the girl who didn’t go to Paris. Until she did! We the audience are supposed to care about her scripted mistakes. Whitney leaves and gets her own series.
I noticed, like I did then, 100 percent now, how every character’s departure lead to the show’s cancellation. Whitney going away to NYC for the blandest show ever, The City? MTV, what were you thinking? Sure, Kelly Cutrone didn’t master plan a massive PR placement of a primetime lifetime for a younger demographic by “hiring” Whitney on camera. Maybe Whitney wasn’t clued in. Everyone else knew she was the type to say yes.
Lauren leaving? Yeah, I distinctively remember caring a lot less after that. The half watching from school time slipped into 10 percent as I did freelance work from home on the laptop or talked to people in other time zones who I longed to hang out with in person.
Why? Because after that, The Hills stopped caring how good the acting was. Lauren was a passably OK actress at making shocked expressions. With her sweet voice and eyes, she could be saying and doing vile things for the show, like her stick in the mud attitude about blowing off Heidi and Spencer until Spencer childishly created that tape gossip. I get why he got annoyed when Lauren refused to play along for the show and collect her paycheck until she could ghost him off camera. For Lauren’s $125,000 per episode, wouldn’t you pretend to like him in ladylike fashion? I don’t know. It looks bad on her in hindsight. Maybe it was scripted?
You kind of notice how bad this show really got when she was swapped out for Kristin. Kristin is the best part of The Hills-without-Lauren. In 2025, we have reality shows and scripted series with eight episodes that feel like too much. When you rewatch noticing how each season had 20 plus episodes, viewing them becomes exhausting as people repeat themselves. The Hills is a show that could only flourish in that nice spot of the aughts. No streaming on demand networks to compete with it then. No “I could’ve seen manufactured drama like this on TikTok.” The nostalgia in me for old Blackberry, Sidekick, and Razr phones, the poofy hair, the I lived through that era a bit younger than the girls, cannot help make the series binge-able to me now. I sped watched. No one else on the show is very good at pretending. Lauren was the glue. Maybe Justin Bobby and Audrina were real. Nothing, and no one, else.
A while back, people said in the media, a show needs to go when every character on the show has dated each other. The Hills passed that quickly.
Heidi was shamed on the final season for being the first person in Southern California history to redo her face. Unpopular opinion of mine: her plastic surgery looked good on the final season once it settled a bit from the swelling. Hate me. Yes, she looked good before. She looked good in a different way as “Heidi 3.0,” her words, after. What she did is nothing when you see what influencers get done today. I’m not going to say what and who only that my eye believes the people who love shaming women like Heidi have plastic work done themselves. The 2020’s Pac-Man pumped up fillers face is a look for people far too young for it now, and Heidi at the very minimum was a lot more natural-ish and glam when you see her settled.
Kristin fake dates people some more. New minor characters are thrown in. It ends, and you really don’t care that it did. You feel bad for how the show went cruel on Kristin for the sub plot of her “having an addiction problem.” You feel worse for Heidi in a world of “my body, my choice” until a woman does make a choice with her body and is hated for it. You feel bad for all the women on this show who have to rip apart everyone else for plots or get fired from the series. You see more how the plots redo old times with someone working at Smashbox Studios taking an intern on like it’s Whitney and Lauren again. You are confused why Brody gets a pass to mumble on camera as the women are given stereotypical bits. You want Justin Bobby back and wonder why MTV refused to show his real band until the last minute. In the multiverse, somewhere Justin Bobby is a rock star because MTV aired his concerts and accurately presented why Audrina found him attractive. The man played a gig at the Viper Room on the last season, but hey, they made him look like he had nothing going on. The power of evil cutting room edits.
You wonder why with this platform, inescapable fame at the time, presence, and their beauty, none of these women on the show transitioned into big Hollywood careers like they should have or did much to change the world. Why go on The Hills without that being the end goal? Easy money to retire early? What was the point of wasting that opportunity through not sleeping and so many fake or real tears? Two exceptions. Heidi has her music resurfacing, and I hope she takes her pop career seriously for the rest of mankind. Jen Bunney became a physician, did you hear that, doing remarkable things as a physician. Why don’t we hear anything about her? She should get the headlines Lauren had. Read on, it will impress you.
“The ex-MTV star currently works as the chief population health officer and senior vice president for a major healthcare firm and is the youngest executive at the company, according to a profile by Modern Healthcare. She penned many articles about the COVID-19 pandemic and keeps fans updated about new medical breakthroughs on her Instagram, sharing a photo of a device that could predict early dementia.” SOURCE
Digital shy, real life outgoing me now has my first real lengthy post on this diary, hosted in 2025 today on Substack as I write. My goal was achieved!