LAST WEEK, MTV’s reality show “The Hills’’ ended its six-season run with an audience-mocking wink. A socialite named Brody Jenner, standing on a Los Angeles street, said goodbye to his sometime girlfriend and watched her drive away. Then the street itself started moving – it turned out to be a backdrop, pushed aside by the production crew – and the camera pulled back to reveal a Hollywood back lot.
Tweet Be the first to Tweet this!Submit to DiggdiggsdiggYahoo! Buzz ShareThis It was a coy way of acknowledging what had been obvious all along: a show that perfectly orchestrated, with conflicts so constant and hairdos so consistent, couldn’t actually be “real.’’ Yet some MTV fans still howled about betrayal, which surely had to do with aspiration. To the tweens and teens who look to MTV for guidance, it must be thrilling to think that you could be famous for being you, with your own dull spats and petty jealousies, finessed by the right makeup artists. And better to get your 35-or-so minutes of fame for being young and beautiful than for, say, being a teen mom.
Of course, if circumstances fit, you could be both. That appears to be the goal of Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston, once-estranged teen parents, who started shopping their own reality show at about the same time they announced their engagement in US Weekly magazine. (Even Bristol’s mother got the news through the gossip rag, we’re told, though she’s admittedly pretty busy with a TV career of her own.)
The Us Weekly story does read like a treatment for a series — they could call it “Alaska Later!’’ — accompanied by a photo spread in which Palin appears to be wearing a toga. Johnston, having matured past his jock phase and his Playgirl model phase, now sports responsible-guy oxford shirts and an arm tattoo of his last name, which presumably comes in handy when he’s writing checks.
The trouble is that being loving and upstanding, as they pledge to behave forevermore, won’t make for scintillating TV. To last in the reality world – and delay having actual jobs for as long as possible – the Johnstons will have to
benrse fight, stumble, lapse, relapse, and generally find reasons to make US Weekly interested again.
