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Fashion-house publicity intern Whitney Port may be sufficiently blond and sufficiently likeable to pass as a reality-TV star. But everyone agrees she's no Lauren Conrad.
And that may spell trouble, not only for Port's fledgling show, The City, a spinoff of the hugely successful The Hills, but for the whole docu-soap genre that Conrad and her coterie pioneered. Conrad will return for her fifth season of The Hills this spring, but her show is clearly nearing an end: Last fall's season-four ratings were down 25 per cent. And so The City, which was renewed for its second season this week, holds the future of a franchise in its fumbling little hands.
The new show was certainly struggling to keep the format alive this week. Port and her gang were getting together at an art opening in full knowledge that model Allie would be in the same room with the woman who had allegedly kissed her boyfriend while she was out of town on a fashion shoot. But as Port dutifully discussed the tense situation with her colleague Olivia Palermo and then with her boyfriend, Jay Lyon, nobody seemed too interested in this manufactured crisis. Palermo even interrupted Port midstream to tell her this was too much information, a ghastly faux pas in this gossip-dependent genre.
“Jay doesn't know why [Port] cares; Olivia doesn't care at all,” offered Jessi Cruickshank, co-host of The After Show, an MTV Canada series devoted to dissecting the lives of the apparently real people on these youth soaps. “And Whitney is like, ‘Guys, this is a TV show. Could you at least pretend to care?'”
Can we trust Port to carry a TV show? The question is important because the groundbreaking Hills (on which producer Adam DiVello has given reality fare the gloss of fictional drama) cannot last forever, despite MTV's official protestations to the contrary. Its ratings are heading downward, and Conrad herself has made it clear in interviews that she knows there is a shelf life for this kind of fame, and that she needs to move on with her career. The City, however, appears to be an imperfect heir.
“The problem I see with the show is the potential lack of conflict to drive the narrative,” writes American blogger Justin Wolfe, one of The Hills' most analytical fans. He compares the plot to that of the Meryl Streep movie The Devil Wears Prada. Port has left her job in Los Angeles (and her spot on The Hills) to work at the studio of designer Diane Von Furstenberg – but he doesn't see strong potential villains in either the socialite Palermo or Von Furstenberg herself. “I don't think Diane von Furstenberg is going to be playing a cartoony Wintourian powerbitch … and in terms of the difficulty of the job and the stress and stuff, that drama is undercut by the clear fact that Whitney is obviously not struggling to get by, that she is a popular television star.”
Indeed, Port has been accused by gossip sites of showing up at DVF only when MTV is shooting. And while she insisted in an interview with The Globe and Mail last week that it is a real job, she revealed that she works erratically. “I go in as much as I can. It's difficult because I have to balance work life with filming. … They completely understand. They know it's a unique situation. I guess it's worth it for them … It's such a large company. They get what they can from me, but they have lots of other women there.”
In the midst of much speculation about how MTV is manipulating these young people's lives for the cameras, it's revealing that Wolfe analyzes The City in fiction's terms of plot and character. In a recent e-mail interview, he said he believes Port's current job is more real than Conrad's internship at Teen Vogue ever was, but also thinks the important difference is how work is depicted.
“ The Hills, especially in the earlier seasons, focused intensely on its depictions of work,” he wrote. “Work wasn't just a place to talk about stuff, it was also a place where Whitney and Lauren did things that tested them as characters and had dramatic ramifications. So far, work on The City is just a different backdrop in which Whitney can talk about boys.”
Last week's episode of The City, for example, featured a staff meeting so cursory it apparently was called for the sole purpose of giving Port, a mere intern, an assignment.
Wolfe believes that as The Hills evolved, the producers became looser about such obvious fabrications because fans seemed willing to accept them. He is not the only one who has noticed that the docu-soaps are becoming more obviously contrived. On The After Show, the Toronto-based postgame analysis that is Canada's great contribution to the docu-soap phenomenon, Cruickshank and co-host Dan Levy seem increasingly cynical about just how real these lives are.
Last week, Cruickshank wondered out loud what Palermo, who supposedly works at DVF, was doing shopping for art in the middle of a weekday afternoon. This week, the two hosts and their savvy guests were chortling away about Palermo's discretion as she revealed her snobby judgment of the art opening to her cousin only in the privacy of her own apartment – with the MTV cameras rolling, of course.
“When they started with Laguna Beach [precursor to The Hills] they were just bringing cameras to house parties. As they evolved, they needed more storylines,” observed Levy in an interview. “In terms of broadcasting someone's real life, there are things you leave out, there are things you replace … Everyone reads the blogs, everyone knows what's going on. There's a misty cloud around [the question]: ‘Is it real?' But in the end, it doesn't affect the numbers.”
Viewers seem accepting of the shows' possible fabrications, and indeed, even appear titillated by the opportunity to guess what is going on behind the scenes; so far, the lukewarm numbers for The City are more likely a vote on its lack of drama than its lack of realism. The show is averaging about 1.7 million viewers in the United States, about half the number who were regularly watching The Hills at its peak. (MTV Canada will not provide specific Canadian ratings other than to say The City is currently its top-rated show.)
Meanwhile, MTV has taken a serious step backward from the artistic inventiveness of docu-soaps with its other Hills spinoff, Bromance. That show is a six-part series following reality star and man about town Brody Jenner, a former boyfriend of Conrad, as he seeks a new buddy to replace Spencer Pratt, the villain of The Hills.
Bromance has challenged nine contestants to entertain Jenner with stunts, to catch and cook dinner, and to make small talk with Playboy bunnies. But the show never stops to ask which is more pathetic: to compete for the friendship of such a character, or to launch a TV contest to find a pal in the first place. Expect the show, which has posted poor ratings, to sink without a trace after Monday's finale.
Bromance represents a serious dilution of The Hills brand, but that didn't stop MTV from sending Conrad herself in to help out on a recent episode, where she interviewed the contestants to determine their potential as sidemen to Jenner's Lothario. It was a classic Conrad performance: charming, funny and warm, yet somehow never losing the mystique that allows her to float above the frat boys and party girls she surrounds herself with.
Part of The City's big challenge is simply that the pert and pretty Port is not Conrad. “There is something about Lauren,” notes Levy. “She is really unguarded the way she acts on camera … She's gone through best friends like I have gone through socks … yet she maintains her heroine status. She can do no wrong.”
Wolfe concurs. “She creates drama and narrative, she does things. … Whitney, on the other hand, seems to just be floating along: Any of the [minor] drama of the show is created and developed by other characters.
“The other thing is that Lauren is so expressive – there is a very real sense of angst in her which she, through her eyes and face and tones of voice, projects in a resonant way. … Whitney seems much more authentic and ‘real' than Lauren but, perhaps because of this, the emotional reality she creates for the viewer is ultimately less affecting.”
Which speaks to the intriguing paradox at the heart of the docu-soap – and the one that may signify that The Hills' great moment is now behind it: Port is probably too genuine a person to keep aloft the fiction that these shows represent reality. I asked her last week if she considered herself an actress. She said no, and I had to believe her.
