Not ten minutes into MTV's "The Hills: New Beginnings," the bubbly is flowing, the lips are glossed and recent friends Audrina Patridge, Whitney Port and Heidi Montag sit pool-side and catch one another (and their audience) au fait their youngsters, their feuds and, naturally, their love lives.

Look, nobody expected the sequel to the channel's mid-aughts surprise, "The Hills," to boost the measuring instrument on a Bechdel take a look at.

As the premiere episode unfolds, the fresh unmarried  Patridge is seen on a clumsy potential date with former flame Justin urban center (Justin Bobby) and -- due to an evening of drinking with the fellows -- we have a tendency to learn that Brody Dr. and his better half, Kaitlynn Carter, could have some marital status strife. There's conjointly some teary-eyed back-and-forth between Montag and her husband, Spencer Pratt, concerning parenting because the 2 appear to be stuck along for all eternity like some variety of reality TV version of the playwright play "No Exit." (Also obtaining lots of screen time: Crystals, presumptively from Pratt's own line, Pratt dad Crystals).

A lot of those things can inevitably return to a head in Associate in Nursing forthcoming episode, targeting a welcome-home party for Pratt's unloved sister Stephanie.

While this all sounds as contrived as friends forcing one another to bop with their crushes during a college gymnasium, that's conjointly what makes the formula work so well for this show and plenty of others.

"The Hills" itself was a reality series that spun removed from MTV's "Laguna Beach: the important Orange County," a show concerning tanned teenagers that was meant to be a jab at the hit Fox drama "The O.C." It's in all probability not a surprise that in "New Beginnings," its new forged members Mischa Barton (who marked on "The O.C.") and Brandon Lee (son of rocker Tommy Lee and thespian Pamela Anderson) appear to be the foremost on top of this nonsense -- maybe as a result of, a minimum of as way as tv audiences are involved, they haven't already weekday through an equivalent re-hashings of snubbed invitations, broken hearts and lady code violations at intervals the cluster.

And is all this essentially a nasty issue or in the slightest degree dissimilar from what those folks not on TV do on a a lot of minor scale?
Facebook and its brethren way back created it only too straightforward to stay tabs on former classmates and paramours and should even be answerable for low turn-outs at highschool reunions. Even the classic Billy Joel song "Scenes from Associate in Nursing Italian Restaurant" is concerning friends filling one another in on past relationships, though there's no inculpative "you grasp what you did" moment.

Nor is "New Beginnings" the lone example of this in current media. Films and written tv are in reboot/sequel mania for years as studios and networks grasp there's a marketplace for individuals curious to follow the lives and loves of acquainted faces and characters.

As the production to a spin-off, "New Beginnings" was ne'er expected to be original. however similar to such a big amount of of the remainder folks, a part of it's clearly stuck within the past.