'Why the Hills might be the best reality yet'

[The Varsity] - You knew this post was coming and you couldn't bear that it exists. Yet because I am on deadline (again), and because I am drunk off Steam whistle beer and hot-boxed dressing rooms with Brooklyn soul singers, I feel like it's pretty necessary for me to exclaim my true love for the fakest reality TV show: The Hills.

The premise of the Hills is pretty without: 3 vaguely attractive blonde chicks (and one faux brunette) live and love in Los Angeles, while trying to make it in the big city. They live in ugly condos with swimming pools and date guys who wear diamond stud earrings. Occasionally they meet up for high-concept sushi and discuss their lives. But mostly they just create falsified "drama" with impossibly obtained medium shots. The show is supposed to be reality—but in this scripted drama comes a kind of awkward semblance of life. Sometimes the episodes are so boring the commercials for hair care products have more momentum. And sometimes there are moments of such dire pain and awkwardness, you realize that within the falsely encapsulated "TV' of the Hills there's real emotional latency that can't be hidden.

But mostly they get their hair done and drive around in luxury cars.

The New York Times did a wonderful recap of the television show, describing reality sensation Lauren Conrad as a "seamstress". It's ironic that within her internship at Teen Vogue, she works the parties she would otherwise be attending, pinning up Marc Jacobs cigarette jeans when she isn't being trashed on the cover of US Weekly. But within Lauren Conrad's classic Californian facade (when she isn't wearing sundresses, she's sporting side-swept ponytails), she's as iconic and classy as Grace Kelly. You want to root for Lauren because she's constantly getting screwed—whether it's the alcoholic boyfriend she chooses to be with instead of going to Paris (doesn't anyone in television learn this never works out?), the flighty roommate whose fiancée might have leaked her sex tape, or awkward dates with dishy models on Rodeo Drive. Lauren had a pretty stellar line to her skeezy, plastic ex-roommate Heidi on the last episode, when she pleaded for her forgiveness. Said Conrad, her icy blues affixed on Heidi's smooth cold lines: "I want to forgive you but I also want to forget you." That's what happens when you forget to buy toilet paper.

As we all can attest to, reality is disappointing. Which is why truly stellar moments can exist in this television show that would never cut it on "Gossip Girl". Take for example, Lauren's New Years Eve in which adorned in a low-slung black dress and sling backs she fights with her stupid boyfriend Jason (who's idiocy is made redundant by his formal top hat), leaves in a cab, ignores his cellular calls, and eventually makes out with him at the midnight mark as he almost scalds her with a lit cigarette and an armful of roses bought off the street. For the men in Los Angeles, romance can be compromised by bushels of posies. For the girls in the Hills, they accept this as love, as long as it comes with a gold chain from Tiffany’s.

Lately I've been really interested in the idea of Los Angeles, this weird strange place where culture seems to evaporate into billboards and the best bars are in strip malls. I like the idea of driving down freeways and eating Mexican food on the top of my convertible, someone bulky and self-tanned feeding me guacamole with cigarette-stained manicured fingernails. If New York means fighting your way through public transit to make it to a bar where you play Merle Haggard songs overtop Chuck Klosterman's Annie Lennox (this happened to a friend of a friend of mine), Los Angeles means staring at Jennifer Garner while she eats a salad. If New York is everything, Los Angeles is nothing. And I kind of want to feel nothingness right now.

The Hills is terrific televisions show because it's so easy to supplant your own experiences into what you're seeing onscreen. In the way that another person's reality can be transformative, so can Lauren Conrad's. You begin to associate their experiences as normative. You begin to feel for people whose existence is impossible to verify. Which brings me to the equally incredible "After show" on (Canadian) MTV. What's better than watching an episode? Watching it twice with bad editing and unfunny commentary from puffy teenagers on low-res web cams. Instead of reality, we receive "post-reality". And maybe that's better than we think.