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She chose the guy over her frenemy.

And who could blame her?

There’s not one girl among us who doesn’t think a guy who says “Hey, beautiful” to his girl can be all bad. Spencer, you had me at “Hey, beautiful.”

I’ve dated a decent number of dudes in my life, and the only boy who ever called me beautiful is the one I married. I still remember how it happened, too. Mike was a grad student and lived uptown, while I had an apartment in the Village. He would come down to see me and then take the red line back up to Columbia in the wee hours of the morning. One night, early in our courtship, I told him he should just stay. And he did, because “How can you say no to a beautiful girl?” I mean. Can you even? I think we’d been dating for only two weeks by then but it was at that moment that I knew he was “the one.” (When our daughter was born, Mike took her into his arms and said, “Hi, beautiful.” I told you: a keeper.)

Whatever happens between Lauren and Heidi (for now, they’ve made their peace: they’re not going to be friends but they will be friendly), I’ll always have a soft spot for The Hills. The show is artifice inspired and cut like a music video; the dialogue is awkward and stilted, as only real conversations are (no one is really as witty as Chuck and Blair on Gossip Girl); but somewhere, just ever so slightly below its glossy surface, is a real portrait of youth and friendship and relationships and their ugly or not-so-ugly aftermath. The kids are all right.

3

BILLIE JEANNE IS NOT MY LOVER

Neal Pollack

OF ALL THE TRIVIAL REALITY SHOW MEMORIES that still cloud my brain as I drift into dreams or sit in my basement, stoned out of my gourd—any elimination of the first two seasons of Survivor, the time that whiny JAP won The Amazing Race, Kelly Osbourne’s sixteenth birthday party, or Marcel getting jobbed by that overrated schmoozer Ilan on season two of Top Chef—only one still has the power to move and disturb me, many years and hundreds of wasted TV hours later: Billie Jeanne, the New York bartender from Married by America. I loved her. She was the only reality TV person I ever had a crush on, with the possible exception of Antonia from season four of Top Chef—a single mom of excellent character who would probably crack me like a walnut in her bare hands and discard me for someone far less neurotic.

Most reality women are either birdlike sorority phonies or overly made-up rubes from suburbs that used to be farm country. Billie Jeanne, on the other hand, was so wistful, so sweet, so needy, and so obviously damaged. She was the sad, beautiful woman you see at the café (the show was on at a time when I still occasionally went to cafés) reading bad poetry, and think, If only I could reach her with my feelings. She just wanted to be loved—to the point where she prepared herself for a televised life commitment to a used-car dealer named Tony. The guy was blandly, generically handsome; he looked like Sting would if he’d never been famous and had spent his entire life in Ohio. Tony had no personality at all, no original thoughts, no character. He was Everyman in the worst sense, that guy next to you on a Southwest Airlines puddle-jump playing solitaire on his PC. Tony couldn’t handle Billie Jeanne’s emotional typhoon. He couldn’t match up with her swingin’ New York lifestyle or histrionic gay best friend. I knew that he was totally wrong for her.

My suspicions were confirmed when she wafted down the aisle, looking radiant, streamlined, and perfect, a modern Marilyn Monroe, and he stood there all jittery like a dude in a second-tier beer commercial. He dumped her coldly and she fled in hysterics. The show’s final shot, of Billie Jeanne hunched in a ball in the back corner of a closet, her face lit in negative like the last Blair Witch survivor while she screamed for the world to leave her alone, burned itself on my soul. In a reality world that feeds us bushels of “that man is a dog” finger-wagging and post-rose-ceremony crocodile tears, here we had true heartbreak trimmed to its very essence.