Twenty years after the end of Laguna Beach, Lauren Conrad, Stephen Colletti and Kristin Cavallari are having an unconventional high school reunion.
The three stars — who broke out on the early 2000s reality show following teens in their Southern California beach town — are back together for The Reunion: Laguna Beach, a Roku special uniting much of the original cast to reflect on their high school drama and heal old wounds.
It came together after the success of Colletti and Cavallari’s rewatch podcast Back to the Beach, where cast members each dropped by for an episode, and started a desire to get everyone together in one place. Conrad admits to needing some convincing though, as she has largely led an off-camera life since departing The Hills in 2009.
“I had a lot of questions, [Colletti and I] had some conversations about it. I wanted to make sure that if we did it, we needed to have a reason to do it — how is this going to be different than anything we’d ever done?” she told The Hollywood Reporter at the special‘s premiere event on Thursday. “I wanted to make sure that it felt like we did it in the right way, which was we wanted this to be a positive, nostalgic, warmer show because that’s what this group is.”
It also helped that Conrad, Colletti and Cavallari all served as executive producers, as original show creator Liz Gateley, who also returned for the special, knew it was important “that they have a voice in what it became and what it was going to look like. We had some fast rules of no manipulation of reactions and all of that, but they were very involved, very hands-on.”
Colletti echoed it was “an important thing for both [Conrad and I] that we were going to have some creative control and tell our story about this experience.”
However, don’t expect this to be Conrad’s big return to the spotlight, as she emphasized, “I think this is the last time I’m interacting with cameras” and the special didn’t spark any desire to come back to reality TV: “I missed all the people but I didn’t miss the cameras.”
Laguna Beach, and its later spinoff The Hills, broke ground over its three-year run as one of the first major reality shows. And as the genre has drastically evolved over the last two decades, its stars are sure it could never be made today.
“I do not think it would do well, I think it would be too boring. Everything is so fast-paced now, you need a little more stakes, a little more drama today,” Cavallari noted. “That’s what was so beautiful about it, there was a real innocence to it. At the time it was something we had never seen before and everything we were going through was really relatable, we just happened to have such a beautiful backdrop with Laguna Beach.” She jokingly added, “I don’t think it would even get a pilot. People would be like, ‘Nothing is happening on this show, there’s nothing going on.’”
Conrad also pointed to the social media element and the fact that “a lot of people now will do a reality show in order to launch a brand and create a business; we didn’t do that. We did this show because we were 18 and it sounded like fun to be on a television show.”
That ethos was important for the reunion as well, Colletti said, as “there was something in that moment that was very innocent and I think that for Laguna purposes with this cast, if we tried to shoot a multi-episode arc again, I’m afraid that it would do something to the original version. I think having a quick little special, get in and get out, is perfect for the show.”
The Reunion: Laguna Beach starts streaming April 10 on The Roku Channel.
