After a brief hiatus, MTV’s The Hills has finally returned to the channel’s evening lineup. It couldn’t have come too soon. As many Gen-Y and beyond young people have noticed, the other increasingly cheap, formulaic, and packaged shows have grown weary and don’t lend themselves to successful syndication. To understand what I mean, watch two episodes of Parental Control and then try not to stab yourself when the clearly rehearsed lines repeat over and over and over and over again. Such a crafted show means it succeeds only in boring the audience to tears – and the MTV lineup is chock full of them.
Part of the reason The Hills has been such a successful show is because, while it is packaged pseudoreality, it avoids beating the audience over the head with its artifice. Sure, we’re all very aware of the manipulative editing and hefty pay for the actors (I say “actors” purposefully). And we suspect that the drama that unfolds on screen is at least partially constructed to keep the show on the air and keep an actor in the spotlight – of course LC went to Speidi’s wedding in the end; what a disappointing finale it would be otherwise! And we hope – so badly – that the fights between Spencer and Heidi are real, even if it’s obvious that they’re simply stretching the storyline into another season.
But we still buy into all of it. It’s reality without being mundane; it’s artificial without being fiction. It hovers in TV purgatory – not real enough to be a documentary, yet not scripted enough to be a traditional series.
This means that the relationships among the characters, friends, individuals on the show – however one might characterize them – are also non-traditional. When Heidi and Spencer have a big fight, is it manufactured? If it is – as is often the case – to what extent is their off-screen relationship tainted by their fiction? Can they compartmentalize their relationship, or are we (gasp!) getting a small dose of reality?
These issues will likely be the pith of the new season. Kristin, from the original So-Cal pseudoreality show Laguna Beach, has a “relationship” with Justin Bobby, Audrina’s former squeeze. It’s already come out that they’re only “dating” for the show; that Kristin is actually seeing somebody else. Still, the show will manage to stay in the murky zone of reality, and we can hold on hope that part of what we see on-screen is true – even if we know otherwise.
Next time, I’ll be writing about the opposite end of the reality documentary series spectrum: TLC’s 18 Kids and Counting. Wholesome much?
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