The Hills: New Beginnings is disappointingly just dumb and not entertaining

Vanity Fair

The original Hills meant something to Richard Lawson, so he was expecting big things out of its MTV revival. "It’s such a bummer that The Hills: New Beginnings is not only deeply unnecessary, but downright bad," he says. "Not silly bad, not fun bad, not bad in the way you can gently forgive on a hungover Sunday as the Seamless plods its way to your apartment. It’s boring bad—verging on offensive for wasting our time, for exploiting our precious, life-giving nostalgia. I suppose we should have expected that MTV would bungle a return to the 10 Spot, but I held the foolish hope—for three episodes! Or, like, two and a quarter episodes?—that they might somehow get it right." Lawson adds: "The show’s art is gone, too. The camera work tries to ape the sparkle of old, but there’s something too bright and HD about it. It’s not just time that has ravaged (and medical work that has un-ravaged) these people; it’s the lighting. And they have the cast do reality show-standard talking-head interviews, something the original The Hills never did, which helped it feel more like the neorealist soap it was intended to be. New Beginnings, with its duller look and flat, joyless affect dims in comparison to, say, Vanderpump Rules, a show that owes a lot to The Hills’s particular gentrification." ALSO: Why The Hills: New Beginnings is terrific despite being objectively bad television.