Girls Just Wanna Be Blond

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

There’s a long tradition of ditzy blondes on television, and it wouldn’t be fair to criticize MTV’s newest reality series, “The Hills,” just because its resident company of bimbos can’t exactly form full sentences.These gorgeous girls (led by Lauren Conrad of last year’s MTV hit “Laguna Beach,” have come to Los Angeles to bypass the American educational system and become full-time party animals. When Lauren is asked at one point if she would take a job in retail sales, her normally tawny complexion fades to white. “You mean, actually work on the floor and stuff?” she asks as though told she’d been called up for active duty in Iraq.

But do not fear: Lauren will not have to suffer the indignities of a real job that requires actual work. Instead she’s hired as an intern in the Los Angeles offices of Teen Vogue, after an interview with an officious editor named Lisa Love, who grills her mercilessly on her qualifications. “Can you write?” Ms. Love asks. “Yes,” Lauren replies. “Good?” comes the hard-hitting, ungrammatical follow-up. Lauren nods nervously, though she needn’t have. Later in the episode we discover that she can, indeed, write good. In fact, you won’t believe just how good she can address envelopes to celebrities.

The first episode of “The Hills” (debuting Wednesday at 10 p.m.) focuses on two nail-biting plot turns: will Lauren get the job at Teen Vogue? And then, after she gets it, will she lose it? The first question gets resolved in a mid-episode phone call from Blaine, a Teen Vogue editor who taunts her with how hard it is to attain the job, and then offers it to her as an afterthought. On Lauren’s first day, Ms. Love warns her that she must uphold the reputation of the magazine with her behavior, or, as she puts it, “you’re gone.” But sure enough, when Lauren’s friends show up at a Teen Vogue party where she has been assigned to guard the VIP section, she somehow sneaks them in. Almost immediately, the group manages to attract attention with their bad behavior, and get Lauren into Big Trouble. (“We’ll talk about this on Monday,” Ms. Love snarls at Lauren at the end of the first episode.)

It’s hard not to admire the canny thinking that goes into a show like “The Hills” – a reality show that finds dramatic tension in the age-old fantasy that blondes have more fun. A job at Teen Vogue, a Melrose Place-style apartment house with a big pool, hot friends, and a cool wardrobe – what else could a young girl want? Such things seem to come so easily to these girls, and the only justification seems to be the color of their hair and the hue of their skin.These girls may be real, but they speak as though cued by a script – they’re living their lives according to a pre-programmed presumption that fun is everything. You won’t be seeing Lauren cry, unless Ms. Love takes away her cool new jacket – and you won’t see her reading, or walking, or thinking. “The Hills” assumes that all the best dreams are silly and superficial.

And maybe it’s true. At the end of the first episode of “The Hills” – shot with a sumptuous wide-screen richness, the lights of Los Angeles glittering in the night like the land of Oz – you will find yourself wondering what Ms. Love will say to Lauren on Monday, and planning, against all your best instincts, on tuning in. It’s a 21-minute window each week into a world few of us ever get to see up close – the world where blondes live apart from the rest of us, with better jobs and better boyfriends and better clothes.You have to admire the unabashed cynicism of MTV in acknowledging that this is the kind of programming teenage audiences want – something as far away from “reality” as you can get. “The Hills” will be a hit, because it’s the kind of show our culture deserves. Television has become a dream state, a chance for us to escape our reality by imagining that this could actually be a reality, too. If only we were blond, that is.

***

On Sunday night at 9 p.m., the final episode of a spectacular season of “The Sopranos” will undoubtedly do nothing to resolve the deep, nagging questions raised by recent events, but it will be riveting television nonetheless. In keeping with its epic story arc, the show’s producers – having used this season to reveal new weaknesses in the family structure that has kept their crime syndicate going for so long – will only hint at the fractures yet to come in its final, eight-episode season next January. Whether or not Tony permits his captains to go to the mattresses in an all-out war, it seems certain that the Soprano mob family is doomed by its ineptitude, its internal conflicts, and its increasing irrelevance in a world run by conglomerates.This is disorganized crime, committed by men who have lost sight of their purpose. Only Tony can make sense of it all; in his therapy with Dr. Melfi this season, he has at last started to understand how his family imposed the life on him that has caused him so much pain. As Tony finally reaches out to his son A.J. to give him something better, he’s conceding – at long last – that crime doesn’t pay.

dblum@nysun.com


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