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Are these the real Hills?

Whistler makes its MTV debut with premiere of Peak Season on Oct. 19
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Whistler's slopes are often featured on TV, plastered on news stations and sports networks as the Olympics inch closer and closer. But next week, our little town of 10,000 is making its debut to a whole new audience: the MTV generation.

Grant Fraggalosch is the creator and executive producer of a new "docudrama" series, Peak Season . Fraggalosch and his crew were in town two winters ago shooting the pilot, which was eventually picked up by MTV. Now, a full season of the series is ready to air. On Monday, the series kicks off in a big way, with back-to-back half-hour episodes at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., followed by The Aftershow, a half-hour live dissection of the episodes, complete with hosts and a live audience.

While the show has been touted by many as the real mountain version of the popular American docudrama The Hills , Fraggalosch feels that Peak Season takes a more refreshing approach.

"The Hills has been sort of quite maligned in the last few years for maybe not being quite so real anymore and that may be an issue that we get into down the road, as well, if the series is lucky enough to continue. But I think that viewers will find that it feels more real, right off the bat, and that's a big credit to our cast because the camera is turned on and they just put it all out there," Fraggalosch said. "You don't really see the wheels turning."

Fraggalosch lives in Vancouver and has been coming to Whistler for years, all the while observing the young, international and adventurous crowd that congregates here, season after season.

"I would just start to imagine what that would be like for a young person to travel to another part of the world and to be there for that season, which is really a long enough period of time where you're not on vacation. You have to have a life, you have to find a job, a place to live, new friends, you might fall in love. And so it's like this whole new life starts, which is sort of interesting, unto itself. But then it ends, at the end of the season, for a lot of people."

He wanted to take a closer look at the cyclical nature of the transient population that is drawn to Whistler, focusing on a core cast of seven young people - Lauren, Dre, Amanda, Matt, Elle, Ian and Steph Just - and what their lives are like in Whistler.

"I wanted to get the whole spectrum of the experience and type of people who go there into the show and we obviously have locals that are born and raised in Whistler, we have the Australians that came just for the season," Fraggalosch said.

It was actually quite a challenge to find characters that would offer the kind of depth Fraggalosch and the rest of the production team were looking for - contrary to popular belief, they weren't just hunting for kids that snowboard all day and party all night. But in the end, Fraggalosch was very pleased with the group they ended up with.

"These kids really wear their hearts on their sleeves and it's very honest. And that was just such a pleasant surprise, as well, because these aren't kids that ever wanted to be on a TV show, they're in Whistler - this is the farthest thing that ever could have occurred to them."

Camera crews came to Whistler in mid-January and started with preproduction right away, then filmed for 11 weeks straight. They wrapped up at the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival, shooting just about everywhere: at cast members' workplaces and homes, and at local bars and restaurants. Chances are, if you lived in Whistler last winter, you probably saw the MTV crew out and about working on Peak Season , as the crews were filming 11 hours a day, six days a week, trying to capture the cast members in their element. In the end, they had 160 hours of footage, which was eventually edited down into 10 22-minute episodes.

"There's no contrivances - we don't put a bunch of people in a house to live together, there's no competitions, there aren't people getting voted off the mountain or anything like that," Fraggalosch said.

Lauren Horton, 27, one of the core cast members of the show, definitely isn't afraid of putting it all out there.

Horton came to Whistler in February 2007 for a weeklong visit and like many others fell in love with the town and simply decided to stay. Today, you might recognize her as one of the friendly faces who serves up drinks at the Amsterdam Pub.

When Fraggalosch and his crew began casting for the pilot episode of the series, Horton decided to fill out an application, just for fun. By the time she was called for an audition a few months later, she had actually forgotten she'd applied.

"There was no expectation for me. I wasn't going, 'oh my god, I'm going to be so famous!' It wasn't like that."

And while it was weird to have camera crews following her around at first, Horton was used to it after about a week.

"They filmed me at work, they filmed me if I went out at the bar with my friends, they'd film if I was going for an afternoon drink or coffee with a girlfriend," Horton said.

She hasn't had a chance to see any of the finished episodes yet but said she isn't worried about how she, or the community, will be portrayed to viewers across the country.

"I was never fake. Nothing I ever did wasn't who I am, so nothing's going to really shock me. If anything, I'll find it funny!" Horton said. "... They could portray me however they wanted to - I know they're not going to - but it won't bother me because I know who I am."

Of course, the beauty of the community is also front and centre in the series, with breathtaking shots of the mountains and Whistler Village nestled in between the dramatic bar scenes and heart-to-hearts with best friends and significant others.

"You just have so much production value sitting there in Whistler and I think that one of the things we really made sure to do was we just shot the heck out of that town and that mountain."

The YouTube and MTV teasers of the show have already started to generate feedback, and for the most part, the response has been positive.

"What's best, actually, is just hearing feedback from the kids that were in the show and other people in Whistler, because I don't think anyone really knew what to expect, even when we were filming," Fraggalosch said.

But there are still some skeptics out there.

"There's a lot of people who are haters. There are a lot of people that are like, 'oh, they're going to make Whistler look so stupid,'" Horton said. "But the show isn't based on Whistler, it's based on the lives of people who live in it, and how everyone lives their lives differently."