It all started with a folding table on the campus of Laguna Beach High School. That’s where Adam DiVello — then a young MTV development executive — began collecting applications for a show pitched as a “real-life 90210.”
It was the early 2000s, when MTV was reinventing itself from music videos to youth-culture storytelling. The Osbournes had proved that “real life” could be bingeable, Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica had turned marriage into a punch line, and producers were searching for the next evolution. Nothing had quite captured the fantasy of teenage life in California. Enter DiVello.
“I actually flew out and met with the principal of Beverly Hills High, but it didn’t work out,” he tells Yahoo. Around that same time, Fox’s The O.C. was becoming a cultural phenomenon, and he saw an opportunity to bring that glossy world into reality form. “I’d spent time in Laguna and Newport Beach during college, and I said, ‘Why don’t we pivot and do the real O.C. — the real Orange County?’ It took some convincing. I don’t think MTV was too excited about filming in Laguna Beach at first.”
Two decades later, that detour turned into an empire — one that continues to define modern reality television. From Laguna Beach to The Hills to Netflix’s Selling franchise, DiVello’s worlds have mastered the same formula: aspirational settings, emotional storytelling and people you can’t stop watching. Here the executive producer breaks down how he still makes reality TV gold.
Rule #1: Cast people we can’t look away from
Once DiVello touched down in Orange County, the show began to cast itself. “We were fortunate enough to get access to the high school. I remember seeing Stephen [Colletti] walk into the library — he had the black spiky hair, the look — and I said to the casting person, ‘We need that kid. He’s our guy. He’s our Dylan,” he remembers, referring to 90210‘s heartthrob Dylan McKay, played by Luke Perry.
Then came the moment that would define the heart of Laguna Beach. “I met Lauren in the parking lot,” he says about Conrad, aka “L.C.” “She and Lo had locked themselves out of her truck, the alarm was going off, and they were screaming. I turned to the showrunner and said, ‘That’s our star.’”
And, of course, there was Kristin Cavallari. “When we read the Laguna applications, Stephen wrote, ‘I’m dating someone named Kristin, but I’ll probably be in love with Lauren forever,’” DiVello recalls. “So we already knew: Lauren’s the ‘good’ one, Kristin’s the rival. That’s your setup.”
Lauren “L.C.” Conrad and Kristin Cavallari in 2005. (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)
With that triangle in place, which needed no manufacturing, DiVello had found the emotional hook — a love story that would make MTV appointment viewing. From the beginning, he says, it was lightning in a bottle. “You just knew that there was a spark there,” he says about Conrad’s affection for Colletti. “You just felt it — this girl’s in love with this boy. Like you just know that they’re in love with each other.”
That tension — between friendship and flirtation, real life and storybook — made Laguna Beach feel like something new. The show didn’t rely on confessionals or narration; the emotions played out like a teen drama, but the feelings were real. “It was magic,” DiVello says.
It was the start of DiVello’s first and most important rule of reality television: find people with chemistry you can’t fake, and let them live their lives — even if it looks almost too perfect to be real.
Rule #2: Make the setting (and music) a character
If the people provide the emotion, the setting delivers the fantasy. “I came from New York,” DiVello says. “I’ll never forget, I watched Lauren’s dad have a palm tree craned into his backyard, and his friend called and said, ‘I’m just dropping a palm.’ I never forgot that expression: ‘dropping a palm.’ I was like — this is crazy how people live.”
Even the high school amazed him. “From the lockers, you could see the ocean. I went to high school in New Jersey. … [Laguna Beach High School] was a really special place.”
Orange County’s landscape and lifestyle became as important to the show as its cast. “Newport Beach, Laguna Beach — it’s like the Riviera of California,” he says. “That’s why the show was successful not just in the U.S. but outside of it. It’s escapism.”
The scenic coastline along Laguna Beach. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
That sense of aspirational living has remained a constant through DiVello’s shows: The Hills, The City and the Selling franchise. “Everybody in the world goes through the same situations,” he says of onscreen drama. “They’re just not doing it at the beach or on Sunset Boulevard. Add the fashion, the weather, the music, the B-roll — it makes it aspirational.”
For DiVello, music isn’t just background — it’s emotional shorthand. He remembers saving Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved” for the Laguna Beach season finale when Colletti picks Conrad up at the airport. (“All the editors kept using that song in every scene,” he recalls. “I told them, take it out — I’m saving it for the finale.”) From Rihanna’s “Umbrella” in The Hills to Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten,” he remembers how working at MTV gave them access to songs they could never otherwise afford. “It wasn’t costing us a dime — the music became its own character,” he says.
With Selling Sunset, Selling the OC and Selling the City, luxury listings became DiVello’s new cliffs and coastlines. The beaches grew into brokerages, but the idea stayed the same: Show the audience a life they can feel, even if they’ll never live it.
Rule #3: Keep it real
Reality TV skeptics have always questioned how “real” DiVello’s worlds are. He’s not defensive — just precise. “We’re not making a documentary,” he says. “We’re telling a story.”
He’s quick to clarify that the emotions are genuine, even if the execution occasionally requires pickups. Take Selling Sunset, for example, which returns on Wednesday.
“It’s a hundred percent real,” he insists. “These people really work there, they really sell homes, their feelings about one another are a hundred percent real. Maybe 5% of stuff we have to reshoot — an entrance, an exit or a dinner we missed — but that’s it.”
That balance has existed since Laguna Beach, when focus-group audiences fought about whether the show was scripted. “They were arguing,” DiVello remembers. “I asked if that was bad, and the moderator said, ‘This is the biggest reaction I’ve ever seen. That’s what you want.’”
Selling Sunset stars Mary Bonnet and Chelsea Lazkani at the 2024 National Television Awards. (Joe Maher/Getty Images for the NTA)
It’s the gray area between truth and storytelling that keeps viewers invested. The conversations might be reframed, the music might swell at just the right beat, but the drama, he says, is authentic. “If Mary [Bonnet] and Chelsea [Lazkani] aren’t getting along,” he says about the Selling Sunset stars, “they really aren’t getting along. We’d love for them to make up — it gives us more scenes — but if they won’t, they won’t.”
Secret #4: Trust is everything
For all the glossy exteriors, DiVello’s shows rely on deep trust behind the scenes between producers and the stars. “The cast is like family,” he says. “They have to trust us, and they have to trust me ultimately, because I’m the final one who sees this stuff before it goes out.”
Sometimes that means handling some situations delicately or deciding how much is too much. When asked about a storyline that almost didn’t make it to air, he remembers a very specific plot from The Hills circa 2007 when Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt were spreading rumors about an alleged sex tape involving Conrad.
“When Spencer and Heidi were saying personal stuff about Lauren, it was like, Do we put this in the show or not?” he says. “You’re sitting at a table with her parents and agents, and we’re all talking about what to do with it on the show.”
Ultimately, he says, they all put their trust in how it would be depicted. Another example of a time producers had to juggle a sensitive storyline was when Justin Hartley filed for divorce from Chrishell Stause in 2019.
“When Chrishell got divorced and said she woke up to a voicemail saying it was over — we were at her house the next morning,” he says. “We were moving her out of her house, and paparazzi were chasing us down the 405 as we moved her into this new rental we got her.”
DiVello continues: “There’s never been anything awful that we decide not to put on the show, but I think there’s always stuff that we have to try to convince the cast to feel comfortable enough to let us tell it. I always thank them for trusting us to tell their stories.”
Rule #5: Never lower the bar
More than 20 years in, DiVello still edits with the same obsessiveness that started in those MTV bays. “I love sitting in the edit room, frame by frame, getting it just right,” he says. “We all have this filter for quality and control. We don’t waver from it.”
That standard extends to every part of production. “I’m not going to air something I’m not happy with,” he says. “If I wasn’t sure we got what we needed, we’d still be shooting.”
It’s that perfectionism that’s carried his brand of reality through changing eras — from MTV’s flip-phone years to Netflix’s streaming dominance. “When I showed Selling Sunset to [real estate brokers] Jason and Brett Oppenheim, Jason didn’t want to do it at first,” DiVello remembers. “He said, ‘I don’t want to be on Million Dollar Listing.’ I told him, ‘It’s going to be different. I’m going to make it for Netflix.’ He said, ‘Netflix doesn’t have reality shows.’ I said, ‘That’s the point. It’ll be good enough to deserve to be on Netflix.’ ”
Three Emmy nominations and a Critics Choice Award later, he was right.
Mary Bonnet, Chrishell Stause, Adam DiVello, Bre Tiesi, producer Skyler Wakil and Chelsea Lazkani in May 2024. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Netflix)
The enduring fantasy
DiVello’s worlds may have evolved from beach houses to penthouses, but the emotional blueprint hasn’t changed. “The thing I love most about all my shows is the storylines are really universal storylines,” he says. We’ve all had disagreements with friends or family. We’ve all experienced some form of heartbreak.
It’s that blend of relatability and escapism — the universal inside the unattainable — that keeps audiences coming back. Laguna Beach made teenagers feel cinematic. The Hills turned early adulthood into a mood board. Selling Sunset gave grown-up ambition a wardrobe and a drone shot. Two decades later, DiVello’s reality remains the same: a world we can’t stop watching.
