ON TUESDAY mornings, in the dining halls, in the dorms, even in the bathrooms, the standard chatter revolves around a single question: "Did you watch "The Hills" last night?" Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating a bit about the show's popularity, and maybe for some, chatter actually revolves around academics rather than reality television. But chances are that if you mention "The Hills" to a crowd of people, you are likely to spark up an interesting conversation.
"The Hills" has garnered an amazing level of popularity in the past few years as television viewers have loyally followed L.A. princess Lauren Conrad and her gossipy friends, if friends is what you can call them. We refer to the characters purely on a first-name basis, not because they are as real to us as our own friends, but because they are so unreal that we speak about them like we do any fictional character on television.
Yet this week's edition of The New Yorker features a scathing review of the much-loved MTV reality show in which Nancy Franklin criticizes "Hills" viewers for their superficiality and gullible innocence. Franklin fails to find any redeeming qualities in the show, writing as if she were a cultural anthropologist entering the land of vapidity. She concludes her article in an expected fashion, citing the immaturity and naiveté of teenagers and young adults as the only possible explanation for the show's success.
She characterizes this generation of young people as materialistic and, to put it bluntly, dumb. For why on earth would any sane human being with the slightest grounding in reality actually sit in front of a television and watch these women live their fantastically spoiled lives? How could watching Audrina's constantly empty expression or Heidi's ever-changing face -- the poor girl is a poster child for plastic surgery -- make for quality TV? I can tell you how.
What Franklin fails to realize is that most people who watch "The Hills" don't for one second buy the fakeness. We don't think these girls continue to land their dream jobs in L.A. on sheer talent; we don't think Heidi's plastic face looks in any way real; and most importantly, we don't wish we could be Lauren. We all know better, and that is why we watch.
What appeals to us most about the show is that it allows us all, for one brief thirty-minute period a week, to come together and feel good about ourselves. It allows us to bask in the knowledge that even if we just failed a midterm or forgot a friend's birthday, we are not the fake, materialistic, spoiled brats we watch every Monday night at 10 p.m. We are -- and we will remain -- something more.
"The Hills" is simply one in a long line of reality shows intended to appeal to young audiences. What once began with "The Real World" morphed into an army of shows that were passed off by producers as reflections of some sort of American cultural reality. Yet somewhere along the way, this attempt to present a reality became subsumed by the goal to simply entertain. Reality television is now just another fictional genre, and everyone knows it.
In other words, "The Hills" is not meant to give anyone "a sense of what it's like to be a young person in Los Angeles," as Franklin believes it to be. Instead, the show is meant to give us all something to laugh at as we stand confounded by its absolute ridiculousness.
Perhaps more than that, and perhaps unintentionally, the show and others like it have given us some sort of common ground upon which we can all stand united. In a somewhat twisted way, "The Hills" shows us that despite our vastly different interests, backgrounds, and career goals, there is something we all share. Our common identity comes in the fact that every time Spencer strokes his own ego or Lauren whines about her love life, we can look at someone else -- anyone else -- and know that we are both thinking the same exact thought.
Watching "The Hills" is a way of reassuring ourselves that we are not alone. It is a way of holding onto our sanity, comforted in the knowledge that no one is actually that vain.
So next time our generation's intelligence is questioned, we can rest assured that watching "The Hills" does not mean that we are stupid or that we dream someday of being Lauren or Heidi. In fact, it means the opposite, that as we watch those characters, we also keep watch of ourselves, always making sure we are firmly grounded in a reality that can never be duplicated on television. Out of absurdity comes clarity, and out of artificiality comes truth.
Amelia Meyer's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at ameyer@cavalierdaily.com.
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