Cable Television Rundown: The Hills vs. The City - Discuss

While attending the wedding of Maria and our trusty co-web designer Dave this weekend, DoktorPeace and I got into a heated discussion regarding our dueling love for MTV's non-music-related not-at-all-staged reality series behemoth The Hills and its spinoff The City. As DoktorPeace energetically stated, "THE BITCH IS BACK!"(*) The question that came up was, which series is more enjoyable? Which series brings slightly more value to humankind?

(*)He, of course, referring to Kristin Cavellari, the "bitch" who was a key member of Laguna Beach and did, oh, bitchy stuff all the time.

Obviously, The Hills made this particular subgenre of reality series quite popular back when Lauren Conrad was the focus of the series, and The Pratts were not even a sideshow, much less the sole focus. The reason, to me, that The Hills was watchable and even entertaining was because there was a focus -- Lauren Conrad, and her (albeit flimsy) job at Teen Vogue. There was at least some focus, and the vapid, dull lives that are documented in the series today were not nearly as prevalent. Now that LC is gone, the aforementioned Kristin is the new "focus", which basically just means a bunch of people are all living vapid, empty lives, behaving obnoxiously, etc.

The City, meanwhile, has greatly improved in its second season. The reasons? 1) The focus is not as heavily on Whitney's love life and moreso on her job, 2) Whitney's got less annoying friends this year. Sure, her chum Olivia is a horribly incompetent employee at Elle magazine, and her new friend Roxy is sort of unbearable, but not to the point where you feel like stabbing your eyeballs out a la Heidi and Spencer. And, frankly, this all makes for more interesting television.

What say you about your fave or least fave MTV reality shows?

This entry was posted by Unknown, on Monday, October 26, 2009. You can leave your response.