YMMV / Laguna Beach

• Escapist Character: Stephen is played as an everyman character who is in a Love Triangle with the two lead female characters on the show, while Lauren quickly dominated the focus of many episodes due to her personality and actions.
• Fanon Discontinuity: A certain subset of the fanbase disregards everything that happened after the second season, as well as the Spinoff Newport Harbor entirely, as they don't feature any of the people from the first two seasons. The ratings bore this out — they slumped in the third season and continued falling by the time Newport began, outright putting the kibosh on any proposed continuation of the core show.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The numerous scenes of characters getting drunk is much harder to take seriously, when at least one participant (Jason Wahler) admitted years later that the show was to blame for his subsequent struggles with alcoholism, due to MTV plying the cast with drinks in order to get "better performances" out of them.
  • Watching the Chrissy and Clay dating scenes in Newport Harbor is more difficult since 2017, as the latter was Driven to Suicide a decade after the show's airing.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: Once considered the golden child of MTV's reality programming (with the viewership and influence to match), many of the show's stars found their public profiles significantly boosted. However, the show quickly fell out of favor in the wake of increasing competition, mockery from the public and diminishing influence in the face of its successor, The Hills. Notably, the ratings slid from the third season onward and never recovered, leading it to be cancelled after a Retool.
• More Popular Spin-Off: The Hills. Not only was it a bigger ratings hit for MTV, but it became somewhat of a pop culture icon thanks to the tabloid-worthy antics of the stars. It managed to last twice as long as its parent show (not counting related spinoff The City or the Revival, New Beginnings).
• Narm: Many times over; the episode where Christina (a reverend's daughter who sings in choirs) is invited to New York for an important theatre audition and botches it so badly that she doesn't get called back is an early highlight.
• Overshadowed by Controversy:
  • The show's first season ignited a firestorm of controversy upon airing, due to claims that Kristin was underage during the spring break trip to Cabo, particularly when she danced on a pole at a club.
  • Newport Harbor became this years later when lead cast member Clay Adler shot and killed himself years later during practice at a shooting range. Bringing up the show often results in the actor's death being brought up.
• Replacement Scrappy: At the beginning of the third season, the entirety of the cast from the previous two seasons, save for Jessica, are gone, having left for post-secondary endeavors. In their place are a group of characters who are not given the same amount of focus to develop, appear to be pigeonholed into the same character roles as their predecessor (Tessa for Lauren, Kyndra for Kristin, etc.) and whose storyline appears to be a direct retread of the situations other characters faced before. Perhaps as a nod to this, the second episode of the season has a Special Guest star in the form of previous season cast member Lauren, who schools her sister, Breanna (herself an example of this trope) on how to act around others before exiting the series completely.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Chase Adams worked at a surf shop?
  • Heidi Montag shows up in bit appearances in some episodes, years before The Hills started.
  • Rachel, a secondary character from season 3 typically credited as "Lexie's Friend," is now better known as adult actress and sex columnist Tasha Reign.
• Seasonal Rot:
  • The third season resulted in many fans tuning out, resulting in a Retool that moved the plot several miles up the coast in an attempt to distance itself from the series. Season 3 features a group of students with a very tenuous connection to the previous cast (the sole holdover is Jessica, who is more or less The Cameo before disappearing entirelty), barring lead cast member Lauren's younger sister, Breanna. The plotlines were also criticized for retreading familiar ground, with none of the camaraderie or relationships that marked earlier seasons and episodes, as well as a Ship Tease between two main characters (Tessa and Chase) that fell flat immediately because neither of them were interested in pursuing a relationship. As a result, ratings and critical praise for the show slid, prompting the aforementioned Retool.
  • Newport Harbor was criticized for doing the same thing as Season 3, only with the caveat that it picked up with another cast of characters whose activities generally weren't seen as exciting enough to match the plotlines that came before — with lead characters Clay and Chrissy's chaste dating plotline intended to be the centerpiece of the season. After ratings for the season went down the tubes, the producers attempted a four-episode "pod" following Chrissy and Clay's college adventures, intended to be a sort-of second season, but ratings never recovered and the show (and the entire Laguna Beach style of teen ensemble shows) was canned permanently.
• Self-Parody: The writers of the MTV Canada Laguna Beach Aftershow (coinciding with the airing of the third season) clearly knew when it launched that the series was a target of derision from viewers, and so they mocked the worst elements of the episodes (including the teenagers' stupidity and the questionable decisions made by the show's writers to beef up the drama) in every episode. They also produced a series of Voice Clip Song videos that ridiculed foolish comments made by the cast.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Some fans prefer the second season over the first, due to the greater focus on the group's final year of high school, along with a bigger focus on self-professed Alpha Bitch Kristin Cavallari.
• Values Dissonance: The Slut-Shaming of Kristin, especially in the Cabo episode, definitely comes off poorly nowadays, especially when many of the guys were acting similar in Cabo.

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