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Susannah, you're right that the appeal of the Real Housewives of New Jersey lies in their outsize cattiness. But in today's XXtra Small, Torie writes about the anti-Housewife: The Hills' Lauren Conrad and her new, semi-autobiographical book L.A. Candy. Conrad's appeal has always been as the bland nice girl... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan, being connected to lost friends via Facebook can be vertiginous—but I bet it doesn't make a person feel quite as lost in time as being connected to a former BFF via reality TV. I'm thinking specifically of The Hills, which starts its fifth and likely final season tonight and has always been, at its core, a long drama about the disintegration of female friendship.
When the show began, protagonists Lauren and Heidi were besties. But it really took off in the ratings during its second season, when the duo basically broke up because Heidi got herself a truly terrible boyfriend. In the two and a half seasons since, other story lines—plus bathing suits, over-determined stares, a tension between "reality" and reality, and the meta-joy of watching celebrity be created in real time—have held the audience's interest, but Lauren and Heidi have always been the A-plot, conveniently running into each other, and shedding many mascara-laden tears, just in time for season premieres and finales.
Losing a best friend, whether due to drifting, fighting, or a cad named Spencer, is something most adolescent girls know about; that's why The Hills has always been "relatable" even though it stars a bunch of space aliens dressed as Barbie dolls. But when most regular folks irrevocably spar with a friend, they don't have to run into her, on camera, for the next three years. Talk about being stuck in time. No wonder Lauren decided she was done filming the series. Of course, even after the cameras leave, she'll still be receiving status updates from Heidi—the two of them are almost certainly Facebook friends.
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Audrina Partridge, the resident brunette on MTV's loathsomely addictive love letter to the meaningfully meaningless stare, The Hills, is getting her own television show. Burning yule logs hold the camera better than Partridge, but burning yule logs have never gotten a chance to think confuddled thoughts near Hills star Lauren Conrad, lay out on chaise lounges next to Lauren Conrad, or to mistakenly accuse Lauren Conrad of making out with their greasy, manipulative on-again, off-again boyfriends. If yule logs had such opportunities, and looked as good in a bikini, one would expect yule logs to break out of the Christmas Eve type casting and land their own reality show, just like Audrina and all her Hills co-stars, including The City's Whitney Port and Bromance's Brody Jenner.
Audrina's show will be produced by Mark Burnett, the reality TV guru who created Survivor and The Apprentice. Say what you will about Burnett (like, he’s the guy who briefly resurrected Donald Trump's reputation), but he understands how reality TV works. Just like in movies and politics, a name is better than no name. Partridge doesn't have to be interesting or charismatic in the limited way of The Real World cast members or the expansive way of the hilarious loonies on The Real Housewives of New York City because we already "know" her. In a sweetly human, but incredibly undiscerning way, prior knowledge of Audrina's story is all some of us will need to care about what happens next. She can continue to be as dull and dim as a burned out light bulb and she will have an audience.
In a big leap from brow to brow, Audrina’s show got me thinking of David Foster Wallace. In the recent New Yorker piece on him, D.T. Max wrote that Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, about IRS employees, suggests that “Properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment.” I wonder what DFW would make of our dependence on entertainment that is already well and truly boring.
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