Hope, Change, Troll
In the spring of 2006, when The Hills—a reality-TV show about the lives of privileged young adults living in Los Angeles—premiered on MTV, Spencer Pratt wasn’t part of the cast. Instead, he was sitting at home, watching with his mom and her best friend. His first impression? “The Hills was aggressively boring,” he writes in his aptly titled memoir, The Guy You Loved to Hate. “Like watching paint dry, except the paint was really pretty and had perfect lighting.” Pratt, who was then in his early 20s, was no stranger to reality TV. He had previously appeared on The Princes of Malibu, a short-lived Fox show about Brody and Brandon Jenner—the handsome, wavy-haired sons of the Olympic athlete Caitlyn Jenner and the songwriter Linda Thompson. After watching The Hills, Pratt soon realized that the two shows shared an executive producer, Sean Travis. As Pratt tells it, he called Travis up, asking—or, more precisely, demanding—that he and Brody be cast on the next season. When they were rebuffed, the duo started showing up at the Hollywood …
