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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: April 28, 2008
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The Hills, “A Date With the Past” (Season 3, Episode 27) [Stream on Prime Video]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: For a show that a LOT of people had VERY STRONG opinions about back when it was airing, we sure don’t talk about The Hills very much at all. Remember? Remember Lauren vs. Speidi? Remember the whole Justin Bobby thing? Remember Whitney falling down at that fashion segment on the Today show?Remember all the theories we had about Lauren’s friendships and romances? That all seems so long ago. The last time anything Hills-adjacent was in the cultural discourse, Audrina Patridge’s house was being broken into in The Bling Ring. Honestly, the fast fade that The Hills has experienced is probably the most “reality TV” thing about a show that was constantly under fire for fakery.
The fakery thing was always a little bit overblown, though. Clearly, the friend breakup of Lauren and Heidi was real, no matter how fabricated the setups for confrontation between the two were. The Hills could arrive at some unexpected wisdom sometimes. About the transitory nature of friendships in your 20s. About the dumb decisions that end up looking so obvious in retrospect. One episode in particular, near the end of the third season, ended up being one of the best TV episodes I’ve ever seen on the subject of how you can never go home again. This was the episode that Stephen from Laguna Beach paid Lauren a visit in L.A.
Lauren Conrad was less than four years removed from her high school years, and specifically Laguna Beach, the television show that chronicled her senior year. The main storyline of that season was the love triangle between Lauren, her best friend/not-so-secret crush Stephen, and his actual girlfriend Kristin. It was easy to root for Lauren, the nice girl as opposed to the more overtly bitchy Kristin. But Stephen was definitely the prize, the idea high school boy with a perfect tan and sleepy eyes and that kind of aloof flirting style that is somehow utterly irresistible between the ages of 14 and 17. Remember how he asked Kristin to prom by simply writing “Prom?” on his bare chest, because that’s all the effort a cute high school boy ever needs to put into anything?
Cut to season 3 of The Hills, after Lauren’s spent some time coming into her own, moving in the fast circles of Los Angeles, hanging with celebrity scions like Brody Jenner, working on the lowest rungs of the fashion industry, a small fish in a much bigger pond. It wasn’t easy to see how much Lauren had grown up in the years since high school because she’d never left us. But when Stephen stopped by for a visit, it suddenly became heart-stoppingly apparent. This boy who once occupied an Adonis-like presence in her high-school life showed up in L.A. and seemed … scrawny. Small. Physically, yes, but also emotionally. I couldn’t believe how well The Hills managed to crystalize what it’s like to see the high school boy you pined for outside of the context of high school. Out in the real world, Stephen — who was still a sweet, nice boy who I want nothing but great things for always — now had to stack up against Lauren’s adult life in Hollywood. And he seemed very out of place. Very much Lauren’s old life.
For a docu-soap like The Hills, moments like this were what made all the contrived altercations and sleepy conversations worthwhile. The appeal of The Hills was always the elevation of the banal (roommate disputes; the headaches of an intern job) into something soap operatic. In this case, they stumbled upon something actually profound, if only for a fleeting moment.
