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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: July 13, 2010
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The Hills, “All Good Things” (Season 6, Episode 12). [Stream on Hulu.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: For the bulk of its six-season run, The Hills became shorthand for everything that people hated about the vacuous nature of reality television. Take every punchline about Keeping Up with the Kardashians you hear today and and slot in The Hills and you’ve pretty much got it, except for one difference. Nobody ever really slams Keeping Up with the Kardashians for being “fake,” a term that got applied to The Hills all the time, and I wonder if it’s because The Hills — and especially its final episode — obliterated the line between real and fake when it came to these shows.
The Hills, during its heyday, was absolutely the best soap opera going, and I can say that as somebody who worked in soap operas while The Hills was on. What began as a spinoff of (the superior, in my opinion but whatever) Laguna Beach, bringing protagonist Lauren Conrad to Los Angeles to seek her dreams of success in … I guess fashion? …Anyway, what began as that turned into a reality/fantasy hybrid where the breakup of her friendship with TV bestie Heidi Montag became fodder for years of drama and recrimination. The reality was that they were best friends … of about a year and a half. They were freshman-year-old-college best friends. Of course that friendship was probably not going to last. But the fact that the friendship broke up because of Heidi’s all-time-worst boyfriend/fiancé/husband/dark elf Spencer Pratt made it all the more TV-ready.
The final season of The Hills was when the seams started to show most clearly. Lauren was done with the show, and with her went most of the show’s reality elements. For as constructed as much of The Hills was, you still believed most of Lauren’s storylines. She really was wounded by Heidi and Spencer and never went back to that friendship even when the show was BEGGING for it. She never embarked upon that relationship with Brody Jenner even though any self-respecting soap opera would have gone there. But with Lauren gone, the show went full Hollywood. Lauren’s old Laguna nemesis Kristin Cavillari was brought in as essentially Lauren’s replacement, inheriting her old friends and establishing new conflicts. It was a canny development but one which tipped the balance towards fakeness irrevocably. Which is why the series finale was such a brilliant capper.
At the close of “All Good Things,” Kristin says her goodbyes to the girls, and finally to Brody, her on-again/off-again ex. As she pulls away in her car, the camera pans out and reveals the whole thing to have been filmed on a lot. A final wink from the show about its perceived fakeness. And who says reality shows can’t be art?
They even filmed an alternate ending, which was even MORE Hollywood.
