Let’s go back … back to the beginning.
In 2004, MTV debuted a new reality show about a group of teens living in an affluent Southern California beach town. Laguna Beach, which ran for three seasons, was an aspirational watch for millennials who didn’t have daily access to jaw-dropping views of the Pacific Ocean and sprawling Tuscan Mom-coded mansions — and whose closets weren’t filled to the brim with Chanel, Dior, Billabong and Quiksilver.
But beneath the black-and-white parties, trips to the nail salon and stellar pop-punk soundtrack was a particular storyline that kept millennial viewers tuning in week after week. It was a question that divided teens and tweens across the country in the early aughts: Should Stephen be with LC or Kristin?
“This was really the first high-profile show that focused on high school kids,” Danielle Lindemann, a sociology professor at Lehigh University and author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, told Yahoo. “[Teens and tweens] could really see themselves or it could be aspirational for younger viewers. They love it, you know, watching it and seeing the glamorous world of these older kids.”
The majority of Laguna Beach Season 1 — and a decent amount of Season 2 — revolved around the love triangle that was Stephen Colletti, Lauren ‘LC’ Conrad and Kristin Cavallari. Laguna fans definitely know the lore, but ahead of the 20th anniversary special, The Reunion: Laguna Beach, out Friday, allow us to refresh your memory.
In what felt like nearly every episode, an age-old question was posed to Conrad and Cavallari by their respective friends: “So what’s going on with you and Stephen?”
Colletti and Conrad were childhood friends who first hooked up when he and Cavallari were on a break. Conrad was always pining for Colletti, who was always pining for Cavallari, who was really just concerned with prioritizing her autonomy as a high school senior. Colletti and Cavallari were on-again, off-again for most of the show, but it was clear that they were, at one point, very in love. Colletti often ran back to Conrad and the comfort of that situationship whenever Cavallari’s interest in him waned. Obviously, the back-and-forth was confusing for Conrad, who, for the longest time, only had eyes for Colletti.
From left, Conrad, Colletti and Cavallari at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards.
(Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock)
While their glamorous, SoCal lifestyle wasn’t relatable for all teens, the messiness of their relationships was. Crushing on an unavailable guy? Talk about a high school rite of passage.
“It’s relatable in the sense that you have two people within a friend group who like the same guy,” Lindemann told Yahoo of the Conrad-Colletti-Cavallari love triangle. “This is something we’ve all seen in our teenage experiences, but now you’re seeing it splashed across the screen. It tapped into youth culture in a very real way and a way that we hadn’t seen before.”
What went down between Conrad, Colletti and Cavallari feels like a cautionary tale of sorts — a reminder of how terribly awry things can go when you send mixed signals. When Colletti and Cavallari’s relationship took a rocky turn in Season 1, he openly flirted with Conrad and, on one occasion, went so far as to slut-shame Cavallari for dancing on a bartop in Cabo. The duo eventually reconciled around the time of Colletti’s high school graduation and stayed together until he left for college. But when Colletti and Cavallari were broken up in early Season 2, Colletti enjoyed a romantic dinner-jacuzzi date with Conrad, which left him too preoccupied to answer any of Cavallari’s phone calls.
Conrad and Cavallari often seemed to find out about the other’s involvement with Colletti from, well, everyone but Colletti. Who could forget that time Colletti, a freshman at San Francisco State University, went back to Laguna for Valentine’s Day so he could take Cavallari out to dinner, which he didn’t tell Conrad about when he showed up to her house with flowers and chocolates the next morning?!
It’s worth noting, however, that much of what we saw on Laguna Beach was either fabricated or exaggerated by producers. Healthy communication among teenagers just doesn’t make for juicy reality TV.
“When it comes to the love triangle, [the producers] from the jump made it seem like Lauren and I were just straight up having this affair out in the open when I never cheated on Kristin during our relationship,” Colletti told Entertainment Tonight in March. “Lauren and I never did anything like that.”
“You and I never really had any beef, really,” Cavallari told Conrad on an episode of her Back to the Beach podcast, which she cohosted with Colletti, in 2022. “I mean, obviously, there was like a little truth to what happened with the three of us. But I felt like MTV coming kept it alive and made it way worse than it ever would have been.”
Conrad reiterated Cavallari’s sentiments in an interview with People published last week: “I don’t think anyone realized they were going to pin us against each other in that way. When we were living our lives, it never felt like ‘you against me.’ But that was clearly something that came out of the show.”
From left, “Laguna Beach” cast members Stephen Colletti, Kristin Cavallari, Morgan Smith, Christina Sinclair, Trey Phillips, Lo Bosworth, Lauren Conrad and Talan Torreiro.
(Roku)
Twenty years removed from it all, the discourse surrounding this Laguna love triangle — and the pitting of women against one another — still feels as relevant as ever. Case in point? The recent Summer House drama that erupted between Amanda Batula, West Wilson and Ciara Miller.
“I think you see that ‘rooting for a side’ now, where people get so invested in these people’s lives [and] they form these teams,” Jack Balderrama Morley, managing editor of Dwell and author of Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV, told Yahoo, referencing the Batula-Wilson-Miller controversy. “I think that has roots in scripted TV like The O.C. and other soaps and melodramas that people were watching before and where people would get really invested.”
Conrad and Cavallari at “The Reunion: Laguna Beach” after party.
(JC Olivera/Variety via Getty Images)
Laguna Beach set a precedent. The show proved that fandom could transcend and even thrive outside of scripted television.
“I think it really was the reality show that transitioned [fandom] from like, a scripted series to a reality series, and then [it] just gets so messy because it’s real people … and you have so much more access,” Morley said. “It took that weird parasocial relationship and brought it into the real world, which is so dangerous.”
In 2026, all seems well in the Laguna Beach girl world. The show’s once rabid millennial fan base has significantly mellowed out — and what was once the juiciest onscreen feud of 2000s reality TV is now a thing of the past. Just ask Cavallari.
“It’s been really nice to have this time to get to know her as an adult,” Cavallari recently said of Conrad. “There’s definitely been a reconnection and I just respect her on so many different levels.”
