Don’t Reboot ‘The Hills’, Just Make It Available to Stream

Last night, MTV announced that they are officially rebooting their beloved reality series The Hills. The updated series, titled The Hills: New Beginnings, will follow many of the show’s original cast members in their personal and professional lives — essentially, the show will pick up where the original left off in 2010, but this time, there will be kids (and likely way less drinking) involved. The announcement was met with excitement from fans, but as one such fan, I’m here to say that I am decidedly NOT excited. Rather than playing to the original show’s strengths, MTV is carrying over its worst parts, and the adult-ified reboot will only aggravate those flaws. Call me a traitor, but we don’t need a revival of The Hills. We just need to be able to stream the original. 

Let’s get the practical issues out of the way first. Yes, you can stream The Hills on MTV’s website, but only with a cable log-in. If you’re a cord-cutter, you’re SOL, and instead of cheering along as Lauren takes down Heidi at Les Deux (RIP), you’ll be ordering Chinese food and re-watching Queer Eye for the third time. If you do have a cable log-in, you’re still not there: MTV doesn’t accept log-ins from every company, and it ignores major cablers like Comcast Xfinity. On top of that, the website crashes frequently and the video quality is abysmal; you’re better off watching clips of Kelly Cutrone yell at Lauren on YouTube.

But technical issues aside, rebranding the reality series as The Hills: New Beginnings is just plain lazy. The list of cast members appearing in the reboot include: Heidi Montag, Spencer Pratt, Audrina Patridge, Justin Bobby Brescia, Stephanie Pratt, Frankie Delgado, Jason Wahler, and Ashely Wahler. Are you kidding me, MTV? Frankie-effing-Delgado? Calling Frankie Delgado a “star” of The Hills is like calling Sbarro a shining example of New York style-pizza. And then we have Jason Wahler, whose biggest claim to fame is that Lauren chose him over Paris? Sure, he and his awful facial hair appeared later in the series to profess his newfound sobriety, but he was never a focal point of the show — and for good reason. Let’s not even talk about Ashley Wahler, Jason’s wife, who is being billed as an “original cast member” despite the fact that we met her for the first time on the VMAs red carpet last night.

Honestly, this talent list is embarrassing. Heidi, Spencer, and Audrina are the only cast members who really mattered on the original show (despite Stephanie’s many attempts to make us care about her, she never drew much interest), and Audrina is the most boring person on the face of the planet. Seriously: I would rather repeatedly bash my head into my computer than watch Audrina fake a will-they-won’t-they relationship with Justin Bobby again. There is absolutely nothing Audrina can do to bring excitement to The Hills: New Beginnings, which essentially means that the reboot will be the Heidi and Spencer show. And that’s fine, because the two are weird and interesting and fake as hell, but eventually, fans will get tired of their bullshit. You need something to balance out the Speidi crazy, and with this lackluster cast, The Hills reboot simply doesn’t have that.

To top it all off, who in their right mind wants to watch these people be parents? The crux of the show was always the partying, dating, and drama — sorry, but I’ll take a chartered casino-themed cruise over a mommy-and-me class any day. “It’s like we’re all growing up. It’s weird,” says Stephanie in the teaser. Yeah, Steph, it is weird. No one wants to watch Heidi teach you how to change a diaper; we want to see you throw that shit-stained diaper out the window at Audrina’s car and then see an epic fight at the Teen Vogue party. But obviously that won’t happen, because these people are older now. They’re mature. They don’t go to clubs; they go to juice bars and lamaze class and regular-temperature yoga. And sure, the reboot will still feature plenty of drama, but “I want to forgive you, and I want to forget you” loses its power when you have a baby on your hip.   

MTV, you’re promising fans a good dose of drama, but, frankly, your reboot won’t be able to provide it. Instead, give us a chance to binge-watch The Hills in all its scripted-yet-real glory by making it available to stream on Netflix, Hulu, or Prime Video. And if you refuse, the least you can do is convince Brody Jenner to join the cast.