Hating on The Hills

Hollywood Assistants like hating on The Hills. Whether we love The Hills, hate The Hills or secretly love The Hills but pretend we hate The Hills, we all love hating on The Hills as Hollywood insiders who just know better.

The Hills returns for its fourth season on August 18, and so do all our reasons for hating on it (with new reasons to surely follow):

Hating on the fakeness of it all: In theory - reality stars, they're just like us. They are Hollywood assistants or interns, they live in our neighborhood and they are transitioning into this crazy place we call Hollywood at the same time we are. Running off of this theory, The Hills should be a pretty close reflection of our lives, so much so that we've all been asked from our friends back at home "Is your life EXACTLY like on The Hills or what?"

Well duh! The only difference is that we're not followed around by cameras! Pretty much every night we're out at Crown Bar or Kress (Because Goa was totally December 2007 and Area is just like, embarrassing), where we DON'T wait in line, sit at our reserved table with bottle service (that we can totally afford) and flirt with our on again off again Prince of Malibu boyfriends until 2 AM, after which we sleep for 4 hours, wake up looking perfect (thank you, live in makeup artists!), head off to work where we don't answer phones (because we're very busy recapping the night before with our office mate – no bosses in sight!) and occasionally jet off to Paris to run major events. Le duh.

The Hills is so fake that even those of us who live for a Lo attack followed by a blank Audrina stare have to hate on it. We take an arrogant joy in being able to one up America who thinks The Hills is fake, by knowing The Hills is fake. You don't really believe that Heidi was promoted from intern to director at a major entertainment conglomerate, savvy event planning friend from Chicago? Well we know this for a fact because we know someone who knows someone who works there! You don't think Audrina has an upper lip, overachieving med student friend in New York? Well we've seen her in person and we KNOW she doesn't have an upper lip (and we don't need a fancy medical degree to make that assessment). It borders dangerously on name dropping, but we know that everyone who watches the show but doesn't live in LA is entertained by our insight, so it's not quite as douchey.

So yes, we can hate ON the fact that it's fake, but we don't quite hate it. In addition to loving pointing out the fakeness, we're kind of holding out for an uncredited writer position on the show.

Hating on the (Maybe) Unpaid Advertisements: It's not the main reason why we hate on The Hills, but from time to time we like to point out what sell outs SBE, People's Revolution, Don Antonio's and The Palazzo are. The MTV producers don't even try to make the voiceover sound realistic when they add in a "Let's go to Hyde. You know, the SBE nightclub by Brent Bolthouse. Hyde is located at 8029 Sunset Blvd and open nightly from…" Ok, it doesn't go that far, but come on. Kelly Cutrone, we know you wouldn't hire Lauren or Whitney at People's Revolution if it wasn't for the air time (you'd totally hold out for Emily, the New York intern). It's laughable, but we have too much fun hating on it to actually hate it.

Hating on the Characters: While we are busy working our asses off to make a name for ourselves in this town, these clowns have built a household name for being a star of…their own lives? We star in our own lives, which, incidentally, are more interesting – where is our $50,000/episode?

Who decided that Lauren Conrad was interesting enough to have her own TV show? We need an American Idol-esque selection process the next time these reality stars are cast. At least on The Real World, MTV actively takes entries when compiling a cast so they have a basis on which to decide who the 7 most mutated social mutants are. The Hills didn't even bother. I mean, just call it "LC and the Seven Bland Dwarfs" and put their storybook names on the screen to add more entertainment: Vacant (Audrina), Dopey (Whitney), Dirty (Justin Bobby), Plastic (Heidi), Slimey (Spencer), Douchey (Brody) and Bitter (Lo). Actually that would make for a great children's cautionary tale book…

We love hating on LC and her posse of self absorbed lame-os, but we can't actually hate them. Consider, for a moment, how important you think you are. Now imagine if over 3 million viewers a week agreed with you, not to mention all the weekly entertainment magazines and club bouncers in Hollywood. If being Bitter the Scrunch Faced Dwarf allowed me to pull in bank and navigate Hollywood effortlessly, I sure wouldn't change it, and I'd agree with America that yes, my life is important enough to be aired for more seasons than My So Called Life.

So love it or hate it, the majority of our Tivos are set to record the upcoming episodes, and we're ready to hate on it for another season. Bring in the clowns.

WHERE: A new season of tears, highly edited facial longing and cat fights returns to MTV on August 18 at 10:00 PM.
COST: A half hour and several brain cells each week