The incessant need to intellectualize The Hills reaches its apex (or nadir, depending on your perspective) in this week's New Yorker, in which TV critic Nancy Franklin spends 1,600 words trying to figure out why Americans of all age, shape, size just can't get enough of MTV's megahit reality program.

As it turns out, Franklin can't make sense of it.

"I don't know for sure what the appeal is, even though I have worked for nine years in the building identified in the show as Teen Vogue Headquarters and some wisdom should have rubbed off on me by now," she writes. Then again, she also says she can't figure out "why teen-agers want their bra straps to show and how it came to pass that crooked hair parts are considered chic and not a pathetic sign that you didn't have proper mothering," so perhaps she wasn't the right person for the task. (Maybe ask hip younger new hire Ariel Levy for answers to those questions, Nancy!)

Of course, Franklin never hits on a higher truth regarding The Hills because there isn't any. That's the whole point of the show: it requires nothing of the viewer other than for him or her to zone out and watch the shiny vapid people do shiny vapid people things. What you see—a slice of highly stylized, tightly edited pop ephemera—is what you get. Even your 15-year-old sister could have told you that.