The Hills Television Program

The TABLOID world -- led by the magazine Us Weekly, along with the paradigm-exploding websites TMZ and Perezhilton.com -- is simultaneously bursting and flat. Bursting, in the sense that these media spill over with several dozen characters whose ongoing stories are meticulously and minutely dispensed to readers in the same lurid and addicting manner that a 19th century Penny Dreadful once was.

IN THE weeks leading up to her spring break earlier this year, Rachel Haas, then a high school senior, wasn't concerned with trying on new bikinis or misting herself with a spray tan. Instead, she was obsessively watching MTV's reality show "The Hills" and making a long list of every restaurant and nightclub that appeared on-screen that she wanted to visit on her trip to Los Angeles.

With finales like these, do we really need a fifth season of "The Hills"? MTV hasn't given the go-ahead, in spite of what certain cast members have said to the contrary. But now that we've seen the goods in Monday's finale, we kind of think maybe another 20 episodes are not necessary. There was closure all around! It's almost as though MTV or Lauren or whoever "The Hills' " powers-that-be are ordered the cast members to sew up their story lines, and pronto.

HEIDI MONTAG, 20, is the best friend and not-quite-trusty sidekick of Lauren Conrad. They appear each week on MTV's reality show "The Hills," a spinoff of "Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County." We caught up with Heidi as she was driving in the Palisades after filming. (And no, there were no cameras in the car.) How often are there cameras on you? Every second at work? Every trip to Pinkberry? Four days a week I have cameras on me, so we don't film every day.

An "is it scripted or isn't it?" storm is brewing around this season of "The Hills." Some sloppy editing in recent episodes, reported in several newspapers and blogs, have raised the question. And last week an online expose by its star Lauren Conrad's onetime date Gavin Beasley sent "Hills" fans into a tizzy trying to figure it out. MTV has always 'fessed to doing "pickup shots," staged scenes that address issues of continuity, not storylines.

"The Hills," the MTV reality series supposedly following the life and times of rich Californian Lauren Conrad, isn't so much about her as it is about "Lauren Conrad on 'The Hills.' " The show's fifth season premieres tonight and marks the beginning of the end of Conrad's carefully orchestrated small-screen persona. The 23-year-old reality star, weary of living in front of cameras for the better part of five years, is after this season leaving the show that has showered her with pop culture fame.

For the last four years, Kristin Cavallari has been a struggling actress living in L.A. She hosted a now-defunct UPN show about party planning that was canceled after two episodes. Earlier this year, she played alongside Rob Schneider in a high school comedy that went straight to DVD. Now Cavallari has landed a role in which she knows all eyes will be on her. She'll take over for Lauren Conrad as the star of MTV's most-watched series, "The Hills," which continues to follow impossibly beautiful, thin and rich twentysomethings as they galavant about L.A. The series returns tonight at 10. Despite billing itself as a reality show, "The Hills" has only become less realistic over its five-season run, and its increasingly weary star, Conrad, allowed the drama of her friends to take center stage.