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If there’s one consequence I didn’t expect to come out of the California wildfires, it was a flop Heidi Montag album from 2010 topping the iTunes charts and her husband, former most-hated-by-millennials Spencer Pratt, going on TV to cry about it. Yet, here we are, living in a timeline where Superficial (yes, the album you might have seen once on Perez Hilton’s blog and immediately forgotten about) is getting the resurgence no one asked for but TikTok demanded.
Let’s rewind: The California wildfires have been devastating, prompting widespread evacuations. Many normal people have lost their homes, their livelihoods, their pets and even their lives. So have many celebrities.
Spencer and Heidi, who’ve spent the better part of the last decade building their “crystal-loving reformed villains” brand, posted a tearful TikTok about having to flee their home. Largely under the radar (in celebrity terms) since their heyday on The Hills, it turned out the two had been quietly living a luxurious lifestyle with their sons in the Pacific Palisades. And now everything they’d built had quite literally gone up in flames. It was a genuinely sad tale, told engagingly by a heart-on-his-sleeve Spencer.
Then, in classic Speidi fashion, Spencer couldn’t resist plugging Heidi’s album Superficial as a soundtrack for the chaos.
Somehow, this unhinged marketing ploy worked. TikTokers latched on to the absurdity of the moment, with such Noughties heroes as Diplo and Flavor Flav leading the charge. (“Put your hands together for my girl Heidi Montag!” wrote Flavor Flav in a 17-second video of himself dancing to the most viral of the tracks, I’ll Do It. “This is amazing thank you,” replied Spencer in the comments underneath.)
For the uninitiated, The Hills was the MTV reality TV juggernaut of the late 2000s. It followed a group of twenty-somethings navigating life, love, and impossibly good lighting in Los Angeles. A spinoff of Laguna Beach, it blended scripted drama and real-life messiness, making it must-watch television for anyone with a penchant for petty fights over lunch at The Ivy. Long before Keeping Up with the Kardashians or Jersey Shore, this was rubbernecking in its earliest gestational period.
Enter Spencer and Heidi, the show’s accidental antiheroes. Heidi started as Lauren Conrad’s sweet and slightly naïve roommate but quickly fell under Spencer’s spell, igniting one of the most infamous friend breakups in reality TV history.
Spencer, meanwhile, was a one-man chaos machine. With his bleached beard and bottomless appetite for drama, he orchestrated endless feuds — most notably the fallout between Heidi and Lauren, punctuated by that unforgettable line: “You know what you did!” (The line was so clearly scripted that it was used as the name of the episode — and people are so obsessed with it that journalists wrote entire articles pointing out continuity errors years after it aired.)
Spencer’s calculated villainy and Heidi’s transformation from small-town girl to Barbie-esque reality queen made them the duo everyone loved to hate. The episode in series six where Heidi visits her horrified mother to reveal her new face among a laundry list of plastic surgeries she recently underwent makes for genuinely sad viewing.
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Whether they were crashing parties, hijacking plotlines, or dramatically crying about their own bad press, they were unapologetically themselves, which, at the time, made them infuriatingly compelling to watch. Back when California was everything, they were so California: Spencer was a quartz-toting Machiavelli, something that could have only existed on the early-2000s west coast of America.
The couple has been pretty upfront about the fact that their personas on The Hills were fake. In a 2021 appearance on the Hollywood Raw podcast, Spencer described how some storylines weren’t just “scripted reality,” but entirely concocted. And in a 10-year retrospective with Us Weekly, he was even more candid: “The producers would tell me to do crazy stuff and I’d do it. It was a bummer thinking I wouldn’t be making millions eating lunch on camera. I’d say five percent reflected reality. We were good actors.” Even the apartment he supposedly lived in wasn’t his, he added.
Yet, their antics during The Hills’ heyday extended well beyond the show. Regulars on the covers of gossip magazines, they sold stories about Heidi’s pregnancy, about honeymooning during the swine flu, and about spending serious amounts of their reality TV fortune on hummingbird feeders. And in 2024, it continues.
The rediscovery of Superficial isn’t just about nostalgia; it’s a reminder of how deeply committed to their bit Spencer and Heidi were — and apparently still are. It seems Speidi has managed to update their brand by leaning all the way into the irony. Memes of Heidi crooning, “I’m in love with a boy and he’s a hot mess” (“Body Language,”2007) now soundtrack clips of people packing their apocalypse go-bags. Meanwhile, Spencer, ever the PR maestro, has leaned into his redemption arc, making teary-eyed appearances about “waves of emotion” and “war zone”-like conditions on social media and TMZ. (”Thank God we made Heidi’s album,” he added during his TMZ interview, segueing from the loss of his father’s house into a list of which countries Superficial is trending in as only a pro can.)
It’s important to note that The Hills isn’t only being branded as postmodern in retrospect. The final scene of the final episode — where the camera pans away from a supposedly genuine interaction between two characters, revealing that they’re standing on a Hollywood set being shouted at by a director — was probably one of the most famous “breaking of the fourth wall” moments ever witnessed. Am I going to say The Hills was the Duchamp’s urinal of the small screen, and therefore it’s actually unsurprising to see it make a 2024 comeback in this way? Yes, yes I am.
So, where does this leave Spencer and Heidi? Somewhere between laughingstocks, cultural relics, and unlikely survivors of the early “reality” TV era. Say what you will about them, but Speidi has always known how to ride a wave. Maybe the apocalypse really is their time to shine.
