In the premiere episode of MTV’s Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, Lauren Conrad takes the object of her affection, Stephen Colletti, to visit her family’s under-construction beachfront mansion. The scene oozes excess: everything is washed in a lush, sun-soaked tone. A crane lifts a massive palm tree onto the property. Lauren walks Stephen through the construction site, pointing out the house’s most relevant features: “I have two closets. This is my clothes closet, and that one’s my shoe and purse closet.”

Stephen, for his part, declares, “This reminds me of the houses on The O.C.”

He’s right to say so. After all, MTV imagined Laguna Beach as a way to capitalize on the success of teen programs like FOX’s The O.C., as the subtitle The Real Orange County indicates. It also offers a window into what made Laguna Beach genuinely novel: Rather than mimicking the formal gestures of the popular reality programs (think The Real World or Survivor) that came before it, which often deployed conventions borrowed from documentary filmmaking like direct-to-camera interviews (or “confessionals”) and shaky camerawork, Laguna Beach brought the visual language of scripted dramas and film to the reality TV space. As executive producer Tony DiSanto declared in 2004, “I’ve always wanted to try to do a reality show that would use the visual language of a narrative like in feature [films] and dramas instead of the visual language of a documentary.” Its approach was to capture a particular mood through its visual style. By utilizing stationary shots, long-lens close-ups, and a saturated color palette, Laguna Beach aimed to construct a stylized rendering of mid-aughts California teen glitz and glam that hovered between the fictional and the real. This approach paid off, with the New York Times’s Virginia Heffernan calling it “the best-looking show on television … [it] has something of the visual momentum of great Italian film.” Laguna Beach’s attention to its visuals and cinematography was, in a way, groundbreaking for a time when reality TV was generally considered lowbrow, uncreative, and trashy—a genre that was thought, in Racquel J. Gates’s words, to “truly occup[y] the ‘gutter’ within qualitative assessments of the media landscape.” Amid the rise of prestige dramas like The Sopranos at the turn of the millennium, Laguna Beach fused the purportedly “low” content associated with reality TV—the everyday lives of teenagers—with highbrow style. Arguably, through this fusion, it aspired to make reality TV an art form. Stephen’s statement, then, functions as an indicator of genre—a meta gesture to Laguna Beach’s conception and visual syntax.

What may have appeared as a risky departure from form, though, paid off handsomely, at least for MTV. Laguna Beach was “an unqualified hit” for the channel; during the first season, episodes averaged two million viewers; in the second, this number grew to an average of three million. Viewers tuned in en masse to revel in Laguna Beach’s glamorous, cinematic presentation of Orange County opulence. Yet, from the vantage point of the present, its impact on reality TV as a genre feels, paradoxically, both omnipresent and residual. On the one hand, there’s certainly no Keeping Up with the Kardashians without Laguna Beach. On the other, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single contemporary reality program that follows Laguna Beach’s formal style. In hindsight, Laguna Beach reads both as a pre-recession time capsule and as an indicator of what reality TV would (and would not) become as the genre developed over the past two decades.

Laguna Beach’s first season introduced the show’s core cast: a group of eight California high school juniors and seniors, improbably wealthy and often even more improbably named. (There are boys named Dieter, Polster, and Talan, while two of the three central female protagonists are named Lauren.) Over its first two seasons (the less said about the disastrous third season, which introduced an entirely new cast, the better), Laguna Beach chronicled the social and romantic lives of its cast, with the first season narrated by Lauren Conrad and the second by Kristin Cavallari.

Although the love triangle between Stephen, Lauren (or “LC” as she is often called), and Kristin structures much of Laguna Beach’s first season, and Kristin’s senior year much of the second, the more important structuring principle of the show overall is the wealth and property of the core cast’s families. In a review for the New York Times, Margy Rochlin stated that Laguna Beach primarily “gets its tension from observing how rich, beautiful adolescents with few discernible responsibilities—no curfew, no housework—introduce Sturm und Drang into their otherwise unfettered lives.” Unlike on its ur-text The O.C., the scale of drama is small; no one on Laguna Beach becomes a cage fighter, accidentally burns down a real estate office with a marijuana joint, or shoots someone to the tune of Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek.” The whole narrative remains low-stakes; the emotional scale primarily comes not from dramatic events, but from the relatable well of high school emotions—who will take who to prom, who’s invited to who’s birthday, who hooked up with who. The conversations and dialogue are often banal. A typical exchange between cast members might look something like this one, from the end of the first season, in which LC and Lo state: “The year went by so quickly.” “It really, really did.” Or, like this one, between Kristin and Taylor in mid-season 2: “Awww, I think he likes you, like, you know.” “Like, whatever.” For a show obsessed with discussing “drama”—who creates too much of it, who’s avoiding it, who’s over it—there is remarkably little in the way of plot.

Laguna Beach’s attention to its visuals and cinematography was groundbreaking for a time when reality TV was generally considered lowbrow, uncreative, and trashy.

Instead, the show often operates primarily on an aesthetic level, on evocative close-ups of its young, beautiful cast and their lavish lifestyle, replete with trips to the mall, designer accessories, and new cars as graduation presents. Because Laguna Beach drew inspiration from the grammars of cinema rather than earlier reality television, it does away with key conventions that privilege plot and character development over aesthetics. For example, Laguna Beach elected to forgo the confessional, a formal constant across reality television’s proliferate subgenres. Whether in game documentaries like Top Chef, The Circle, or RuPaul’s Drag Race, dating shows like Love Is Blind or The Bachelor, or documentary soap-operas like The Real Housewives, Selling Sunset, or The Kardashians, the confessional plays a crucial role in the construction of narrative form. The confessional is the space in which reality cast members begin the process of interpretation for the audience—which, as Ashley Rattner has argued, is one of the central pleasures of the reality television genre. Savvy reality cast members use confessionals to stake claims on the narrative, to attempt to curry favor with the audience, or to leverage their appearance on reality TV toward extending their 15 minutes of fame. The confessional has been a key convention of reality television since the genre’s inception as a genre proper.

By discarding the confessional as structuring device, Laguna Beach complicates the formal style of reality television. Other reality shows often use confessionals to interrupt conversations and clarify the action; in Laguna Beach, their words sit as they are. The typically circuitous, unclear, or even boring high school conversations of sunkissed, ultra-wealthy early aughts teens, replete with “ums” and “likes” and “yeahs,” are made into entertainment through production and editing technologies. An innocuous moment can become freighted with meaning through the use of long close-ups, which, as Elana Levine argues, function much like the “‘egg’—the shot at the end of many daytime soap scenes in which an actor holds an expression for several beats until the scene fades out.” Moving in montage between the beautiful setting (and the porousness between the beach and the domestic sphere) and the conspicuous consumption, these seemingly banal conversations come to accrue meaning for viewers through the accumulation of time spent with the cast. Klein, drawing from Misha Kavka, refers to this genre of reality programming as creating its appeal based on “simply watching individuals perform themselves.” There isn’t the drama of strangers coming into conflict, as on The Real World, or seeing “ordinary people” in “extraordinary situations,” as on Survivor or Big Brother. Instead, Laguna Beach magnifies and intensifies high school microdramas to the scale of televisual interest through its pop music soundtrack, its use of close-ups, and its editing style, which often stitches together shots to create plot or emotion purely by implication.

LC’s longing, unmediated gazes at Stephen create a sense that the cast members’ lives are beautiful and easy—and importantly, desirable. As Amanda Ann Klein indicates, “their stories are aspirational—audiences are encouraged to dress, consume, and behave like LC and her wealthy, white female peer group.” Indeed, the show’s visual fetishization of material objects and particularly real estate encourages an aspirational, laudatory view of the country’s wealthiest West Coast dynasties. Many scenes begin with establishing shots of the cast members’ massive mansions, framed akin to the kind of exterior shots often deployed by sitcoms. Every episode concludes with rolling footage of coastal real estate, which is preceded by constant shots of the crashing waves on the breathtakingly beautiful California coast. Indeed, the interplay between the picture-perfect beach, opulent real estate development, and the abundant, wanting-for-nothing domestic space represents the show’s preoccupations and intentions more so than the minutiae of LC and Kristin’s feud. By drawing upon reality television’s generic dependence on what Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette call a “self-conscious claim to the discourse of the real,” Laguna Beach promises an intensification of visual pleasure in audience consumption of its sumptuous scenes of upper-class life. As Levine argues, “The luxurious homes, pristine beaches, vivid sunsets, and swimsuit-clad bodies of the high school cast make these montages delicious eye candy. These montages may well be the show’s primary pleasure.”

The wealth on the program feels most conspicuous in the real estate shots, but it permeates much of Laguna Beach’s narrative content as well. In the first episode of the series, LC and best friend Lauren Bosworth (nicknamed “Lo”) throw a “black and white” party, renting a space at a hotel called the “Surf & Sand Resort” for the cost of $700 to throw a high school party. When buying dresses for prom later in the season, LC holds up a dress, asking for Lo’s opinion. “Don’t you have that?” Lo questions. “I don’t have the yellow,” LC replies, before revealing that she owns the dress in at least three other colors already. In the second season premiere, Kristin and friends are picked up for a night out in a limo owned by a friend’s father. Wealth is taken for granted; cast members never worry about how they’ll pay for anything, and their parents (who pay for everything) barely feature. These moments, in which the excess of these teens’ lives come to the fore, also exemplify the implicit whiteness of the series. Laguna Beach’s central fixation, besides property, is its celebration of the white, rich, popular “it girl” (all the better if she’s blond too, as LC, Lo, and Kristin are—all of the brunette women cast members from the first season are unceremoniously booted for the second). The white, rich, popular “it girl,” Laguna Beach promises, is not only free from problems, but also the pinnacle of beauty and desirability. There’s a connection, then, between Laguna Beach’s lush close-ups of LC’s face and its recurrent, luxuriating shots of Orange County mansions.

Laguna Beach’s cinematic style both sells and celebrates luxury as aspirational. By aestheticizing and glamorizing palatial California properties and the privileged, carefree lives of the teenagers who lived in them, its style cements the conceptual link—pervasive to US racial capitalist political economy—between the ownership of private property and freedom. The violence and exclusion that underwrite the very political economy that makes airlifting palm trees into mansion lots have no place in the world of Laguna Beach, the show, even as they create Laguna Beach, the location. Laguna Beach’s cinematic visual language forges property as a site of pleasure and desire; its move toward the cinematic, then, is not only an artistic gesture, but a political-ideological one as well.

Like its progenitor The O.C. and its inheritors The Hills (itself a Laguna Beach spin-off), Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and The Real Housewives of Orange County, Laguna Beach aimed to aestheticize and glamorize the lifestyles of the rich. But its particularly intense, unmediated adoration of luxury—constructed in part through its embrace of cinematography over plot—feels particularly tied to the pre-recession economy it was produced in. Of course, just two years after Laguna Beach concluded, the housing bubble would burst. Looking back, Laguna Beach functions as a time capsule not only of a particular economic milieu—a fizzy, pre-recession world of elite suburban lifestyles populated by “Can-Do” it girls who embody a carefree, consumption-driven postfeminist vision of girlhood—but also of a particular moment in reality TV’s generic development.

Because of its marked differences between conventional reality TV’s visual and formal gestures, Laguna Beach feels like an odd object to apprehend, 20 years on from its premiere and over 30 years on from reality TV’s consolidation into a genre proper. It is the rare reality series that actually made stars of its then-unknown cast, a promise that would go on to propel countless individuals to offer their lives up as entertainment in hopes of a chance at stardom. It began and ended prior to reality television’s symbiotic relationship with social media, and the circuits of fan engagement, parasociality, and self-branding that that relationship engendered. It does not much resemble the reality TV series that followed it (with the exception of its spin-offs, The Hills, The City, and The Hills: New Beginnings), even as its influence on the genre remains indelible.

We could argue, for instance, that The Real Housewives of Orange County, which launched Bravo’s long-running, wide-ranging Real Housewives franchise, owes a considerable debt to Laguna Beach. Just as Laguna Beach capitalized on the popularity of The O.C., The Real Housewives of Orange County capitalized on the larger interest in Orange County as a locale, as well as the popularity of Desperate Housewives. Purely by virtue of having The Real Housewives of Orange County and Keeping Up with the Kardashians as its thematic descendants, Laguna Beach inarguably shifted the landscape of US reality television. In fact, we can trace much of what the documentary–soap opera subgenre has become back to those two programs.

So it is interesting, then, that neither picked up on Laguna Beach’s form, despite leaning heavily on its content. Neither of these series elects to use Laguna Beach’s cinema verité–inflected style; both employ confessionals. Both, additionally, are much more heightened affectively than Laguna Beach, engaging in a much more histrionic, conventionally soap-operatic mode of sociality. If Laguna Beach’s style was so central to its celebration of wealth, property, whiteness, and luxury—if its style both expresses and indexes its politics—the absence of that style suggests that its particular visual grammars are no longer tenable in a more politicized, post-recession era. This is not to say that the kind of politics Laguna Beach epitomizes has disappeared from the scene; the gauzy glorification of real estate and blond Barbie bodies on Netflix’s Selling Sunset, for one, suggests otherwise. But Selling Sunset, like so many other contemporary reality series, punctures its reveries of property with camp and humor, as well as with confessionals. It delivers its fantasies with a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too wink. Yet the core of the fantasy remains; it’s merely, like LC did from Laguna Beach to The Hills, updated its style.

To look back on Laguna Beach, 20 years on, is to note it both as formative and aberrative within the development of reality television as a genre. It is profoundly of its moment, a document of pre-recession values and aesthetics, and a strange entry in reality TV’s iterative progression. It feels removed from the contemporary moment on the level of aesthetic and textual concerns—one can only imagine the kinds of discourse it might inspire if it premiered today. To return to it is to return to a glossy, glitzy pop cultural moment, soundtracked by the likes of Maroon 5, Five for Fighting, and Mandy Moore. But it is perhaps also to note the illusions of that moment—that, perhaps, perfect didn’t feel so perfect after all. 

Featured image: Still from the series premiere of Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County (2004).