Hoping for some sort of charm, I gave The Hills: New Beginnings three chances. Meaning, I watched three episodes of MTV’s latest bit of necromancy, a came-back-wrong reboot of perhaps its most seminal series of the new century. It’s hard to articulate just what the original Hills—an MTV reality show about wealthy young people in their 20s navigating Los Angeles—gave to us, except to say that it gave us everything. Or, at least, it gave us so much of what we have since staggered in: a fog of self-regard we’ve named influencer culture.

The Hills originally ended in 2010, a few summery months before Instagram beamed into being, providing a ready-made, sun-dappled aesthetic for a certain set of photo-posters to aspire to. The Hills also marked a crucial shift in big-city wishes, retraining our gazes from the fabulous but penned-in Manhattan of Sex and the City to the glittering sprawl of Los Angeles. The series is a year older than Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which took the baton and ran it all the way to where we are now—but Lauren Conrad and her horde of friends and love interests got there first! What a time that was, what a phenomenon.

And now they’re back. Well, not Lauren; she’s busy being a lifestyle guru, a mom, a podcaster. But Audrina Patridge is, and Whitney Port (sort of). Brody Jenner, a Calabasas refugee, is back. So, of course, are Heidi Montag and her flesh-bearded husband Spencer Pratt, two reality sickos who have weathered surprisingly well in the near-decade since the sun faded on them. I don’t know. Is it embarrassing that I felt a faint glimmer of excitement at the idea of seeing them all arrayed together again, these ghouls and goddesses of my 20s, now joining me in my 30s—finally updated, instead of forever frozen as 24-year-olds pawing at life?

If it is embarrassing, oh well. I was excited. Because The Hills meant something to me, both personally (sure) and professionally; recapping the show was one of the first things that got me attention as a fledgling blogger. (There were bloggers once!) Who doesn’t like a reunion, a regathering of the diaspora, a new huddle to remind us all of where we’ve been? It’s a cozy idea, a sweetly melancholy one—a revisiting of a simpler era when we were all just a little bit less aware of what everyone was doing all the time.

Which is why it’s such a bummer that The Hills: New Beginnings is not only deeply unnecessary, but downright bad. Not silly bad, not fun bad, not bad in the way you can gently forgive on a hungover Sunday as the Seamless plods its way to your apartment. It’s boring bad—verging on offensive for wasting our time, for exploiting our precious, life-giving nostalgia. I suppose we should have expected that MTV would bungle a return to the 10 Spot, but I held the foolish hope—for three episodes! Or, like, two and a quarter episodes?—that they might somehow get it right.

The first episode offers some of the satisfying stuff I was craving. It is nice to see Audrina and the rest sorta settled into adult life. Some have kids; some are married; some are still carrying on the way they were ten years ago, only they have a wrinkle of self-awareness now. There’s a weariness to the pose, a huff of resignation. That all feels true to real life, the way all steady and imperceptible change is really only visible when you’re thrown back into the stark contrast of your past. “Oh, how weird!” everyone on The Hills: New Beginnings seems to be thinking in the pilot, as they settle down for more canned conversations with each other. It’s pleasant, all the catching up. Everyone is warm, because who can really remember what all those old fights were about?