It’s hard to imagine loyalists of “The Hills” — the MTV network’s brilliant reality soap opera, which aired in its first run from 2006 to 2010 — finding much to keep them tuned into the ambitiously…
The new series is focused on a group of acquaintances who were brought together in order to be cast members on a heavily-produced reality series. As in the friends-reunited film “The Big Chill,” the issue at hand is hard to discuss, and as in that film, one friend is crucially absent.
“The Hills: New Beginnings,” at a punishing hour-long running time, follows suit. Its seeming protagonists, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, are familiar to viewers of the first iteration as the sneering villains whose behavior came to throw off the series’s balance, pushing past the frame to pursue fame by turning friendly competition for camera time into a mean-spirited game. In the run towards notoriety, both came to seem warped by the camera’s glow.
“The Hills,” round one, was assiduously careful never to let the increasing fame of its participants enter the show’s story; it also worked to make them understandable and, eventually, iconic through their bearing and not their testimony, building a narrative through actions and not through confessional clips. This series tosses both, letting its bruised-but-striving stars explain themselves at some length and further deflating their flaunting of what’s left.
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