Spencer Pratt’s Reality-TV Playbook

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 nightclubs where the Hills cast was filming, over and over again. Pratt eventually got on the show when he started dating Heidi Montag, the party-loving roommate of Lauren Conrad, the central character whose unmistakable Californian drawl narrated the series. He immediately cemented himself as an agitator who was always willing to stir up drama by fighting with the other cast members and even with his own family, disrupting the show’s low-key vibe and turning it into addictive viewing.Twenty years on, Pratt is once again a figure who can’t be ignored: an insurgent challenger to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s reelection bid. Pratt, a registered Republican, has positioned himself as an anti-establishment voice prepared to take a tough approach on homelessness, drug “zombies,” and crime, and he is currently polling a strong second in L.A.’s nonpartisan mayoral-primary election. His campaign, which was inspired by the experience of losing his Pa