It’s an odd scene to witness, at once totally genuine and ridiculously contrived,
which is to say it feels like any episode of The Hills. The show’s glittery production
values are such that no one can watch without thinking it is entirely staged, yet from
what I can gather, the fake reality is more real than you might think.
New York Magazine profile for the reality show The City
On July 13, 2010, MTV’s reality show The Hills aired its last episode. Due to its artificiality and excessive production, it had long been rumored that most of the show’s dialogues and situations were scripted, which is why it was called a pseudo-reality or a real-soap opera.
As a nod to these criticisms, the show’s final scene decided to play a sophisticated joke on its audience. At the end of the episode Kristin Cavallari —famous for Laguna Beach, the “real” version of The O.C.— and Brody Jenner —member of the Kardashian-Jenner clan— say goodbye on an L.A. street after Kristen decides to move to Europe. She climbs into her car as he watches her from the street with the Hollywood Hills behind him. Suddenly, the backdrop of the scene is dragged away by a couple of assistants revealing a backlot. Everything has taken place in a studio. The camera pulls away and we see that Kristin’s car hasn’t left, Brody runs to hug her and greet the members of the production team. Roll credits. An equivalent of the falling spotlight in The Truman Show, but now Truman is us.
The thing, said Jenner in an MTV interview,
“what’s real and what’s fake, you don’t know […] Our relationship, the entire time could have been fake […] That’s one of the questions: what was real and what was fake, and we left it [open].”1
The City, a spin-off of The Hills that takes place in New York, used the same production formula that made it impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. Indeed, this fake reality, to quote New York Magazine’s profile of the show, “is more real than you might think.” It is a hyper-real threshold that shows us how the media gobbles up more territory every day.
- Jocelyn Vena, “‘The Hills’ Cast Addresses Mysterious Finale Scene” MTV, July 14, 2010, https://www.mtv.com/news/1643610/the-hills-cast-addresses-mysterious-finale-scene/ ↩︎
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