I was an avid fan of The Hills for years. I watched Laguna Beach, I watched Heidi Montag before she ruined her face and I even watched the spin-off The City and am still waiting to find out what life after People’s Revolution is like for Whitney Port. When it was revealed at the end of The Hills that the entire series was fake I was mortified. I felt that for my entire childhood all the way into my senior year of high school, the life I thought these people I was so invested in were real.

It was all a fake. Lauren and Kristen didn’t hate each other as much as it was led on for us all to believe. They never so much as even saw each other when cameras weren’t around to film for the series. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were entitled to letting us know the truth, or if we were expecting too much because it was all reality for entertainment sakes and not the other way around.

There is a massive difference between reality for entertainment’s sake and entertainment for reality sake. For Laguna Beach: The Real OC, the series was crafted around the lives of seemingly attractive red-blooded young American’s living in the richest county in America. It chronicled their love lives, their heart breaks, their spring break’s in Cabo and getting grounded for bad grades. It felt real because – aside from the lavish spring break destinations without parental supervision – their reality was something we could relate to. They were our age or at the very least close to it, and we aspired to go through the high school drama that these high schoolers endured. We didn’t stop to think that maybe their lives were a little too conflicted with a lot of drama and leisure time, and not a lot of school work.

That’s boring – we don’t want to see the side of our lives that we deal with every day, we want to see the side of our lives that happens every once in a while but isn’t on display for the world to see. Human nature lends itself to only being happy to deal with drama when it doesn’t involve our own lives. That’s the reality of many others, and myself whether they want to admit it or not. We are inherently interested in drama only when it doesn’t involve our own lives because seeing another person’s life spiral out of control is more entertaining than seeing our own do it. The spin-off’s of the series, The Hills and The City were crafted under the same blueprint: to build a show off of relatively small areas of their lives and blow them up for the entire world to see.

We weren’t smart enough to know that most of this drama was too frequent to be true. No one is dealing with the amount of relationship’s foiled and backstabbing friends on a weekly basis. Common sense would inform you of that, but their audience was impressionable young girls for the most part. Impressionable young girls are fascinated with fantasies and fairy tales (see: Cinderella and Snow White). We like to know that there is a possibility for us to be left with the decision of a beach house with Jason for the summer or travelling to Paris for Teen Vogue; as a sidebar, that was the dumbest decision Lauren ever made and taught young women all across America an important lesson: never choose a man over your career.  We also like to be distracted, so being that MTV knew who they were marketing to and that we would eat their false drama all up, it isn’t their fault entirely.

I don’t appreciate the preface at the beginning of every show stating that the drama and the people were real, but I understand why they did this. If the show weren’t real, it would be just another 90210 – we have both that past and present version of that. What we didn’t have were real versions of this soap opera life we would see Hollywood create. The allure that they provided was enough for them to have a staying power of almost 8 years.

It’s unfortunate that I have to say goodbye to reality I once thought of as real, but it was good while it lasted.