The Hills loses 900,000 viewers without Lauren Conrad, but The City is up 43 percent

The Tuesday return of MTV’s two pseudo-reality shows brought bad news for one of them and good news for the other.

Without Lauren Conrad, The Hills lost viewers compared to its April season premiere, with 2.1 million viewers watching. Broadcasting & Cable reports that although those numbers are “down from 3 million viewers for the last season premiere in April, and 3.5 million from the season premiere in August 2008, … MTV noted that the show was still the top program on television in its time period in the 12-34 demo the network targets.”

Most of those viewers stuck around at 10:30 to watch The City, which had 2 million viewers, “up 43% from its series premiere, which drew 1.6 million viewers.”

MTV’s press release on the ratings and pairing of the two shows says that led the network to “its strongest Tuesday 10-11PM rating in over a year.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the drop in viewers. I regret the error.