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The Hills not reality TV? No! – Metro US

The Hills not reality TV? No!

Michael buckner/getty images

Lauren Conrad, star of “reality” series, The Hills.

THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: There are some people you’d trust your life and family with, others whom you think twice about lending your extra copy of Weekend At Bernie’s – not the DVD, but the VHS you can’t bring yourself to get rid of because it was the first thing you played on the first night in the first apartment you lived in alone. Then, of course, there are the people who probably can’t be trusted with objects sharper than a credit card; the sort of folks who you’ve lied to just to avoid being in a car while they’re behind the wheel. (“Uh, my claustrophobia’s acting up really bad. I might go nuts and start clawing out my eyes. I’d better walk. I know it’s twenty miles. I need the exercise.”)

I was forced to think about these sad but frightening folks when I read an item in the New York Post gossip section that began with the sentence: “They call MTV’s The Hills a ‘reality’ show, but we’ve had our doubts for some time.” What, you wonder, tipped them off? The uncanny ability to have the camera in exactly the right spot at the right time, capturing the perfect reaction to every line of dialogue? Or the fact that no one without a rare, barely classified personality disorder could fail so wildly while trying so hard to look “normal,” since the aliens are all watching from their spaceships orbiting overhead, and only they know, and can’t tell anyone until they’re a thousand feet underground in a lead mine.

But really, what tipped the Post off? Well, apparently the show was filming in a New York restaurant recently, and it just looked, well, fishy. “It was clear that this show is not a reality show,” wrote one of the diners to the Post. “They took five takes of (Hills star) Lauren (Conrad) ordering dinner. The film crew took over the outside eating area by setting up lights and cameras everywhere. They should go back to California.”

Those New Yorkers – you can’t pull anything over on them. Any minute now and some preternaturally perceptive Gothamite is going to tell us that the best singer never wins American Idol, and that Donald Trump has pretty bad taste. I just don’t want anyone talking smack about The Real World; I know authentic, bred-in-the-bone, can’t-get-the-sticky-tape-off-a-DVD-package stupid when I see it.

As if anticipating New York’s collective hairy eyeball turning in the direction of the show, an interview with Conrad ran in the New York Observer, where the “budding fashion designer” (wink wink) talked about how it just happened that she and her friends were such TV naturals. “We’re lucky,” she said. “We have exciting lives, and it’s L.A., and they can show how glamorous it can get. But everyone goes through the same things – no matter where you are from, no matter what you do, you deal with the same stuff.”

“We’re on a reality show, so we can’t take ourselves too seriously,” she added. OK then – if The Hills is a reality show, then some basic rule of the universe has been re-written, and from this moment on I am no longer a TV columnist, but an M1A1 Abrams tank that turns into a 90-foot-tall robot that shoots streams of molten slag from its eyes. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

rick.mcginnis@metronews.ca