The Girls Next Door was a snapshot in time.
It’s why Holly Madison—now 20 years removed from the show’s premiere, which chronicled the life of her and Hugh Hefner’s other girlfriends in the Playboy Mansion—thinks a spinoff of the series never came to be.
“I always say it’s the one show you can’t reboot,” she told E! News’ Keltie Knight during an exclusive interview, “because it was like catching this little cult bubble in real time. And you can watch it two different ways. You can watch it for all the eye candy like the first time it came out and say, ‘Oh my God, look how fun.’ Or you can watch it knowing about all the stuff going on behind the scenes, and that adds a whole other layer.”
And it’s partly because of those behind-the-scenes secrets that Holly and fellow Mansion alum Bridget Marquardt started their rewatch podcast, Girls Next Level.
“We’re going into season four now and there’s just so much to talk about,” the 45-year-old said. “It kind of takes on a whole life of its own for sure.” (For more with Holly, tune into E! News on May 7 at 11 p.m.)
But just the fact that Girls Next Door is celebrating its twentieth anniversary has thrown Holly for a loop. “I feel so old,” she said. “That’s a lifetime ago. It’s so crazy.”
A lifetime ago, yet Holly has still held onto items from that era of her life.
“I definitely have so much memorabilia,” she admitted. “We share a lot of it on the podcast. I like to do little Easter eggs where I’ll wear a dress that I wore on the show that we talked about and stuff. So I’m very much a hoarder.”
But while she is quick to admit she loves “that stuff,” Holly—who shares daughter Rainbow, 12, and son Forest, 8, with ex-husband Pasquale Rotella—explained she keeps most of her keepsakes in a storage room.
“I don’t want my kids to see it,” Holly added, noting she isn’t sure when she’s going to share this piece of her history with them. “I’m still making up weird excuses. It’s weird because the kids that age, they have no idea what Playboy is because it just doesn’t exist the way it used to.”
So in the meantime, when people stop and ask her for photos in front of her children, she tells them it’s because she does YouTube. After all, being a mom doesn’t have a rulebook.
“With parenting, you can read all the books you want and you’re never prepared for what that next phase is,” Holly continued. “You know, your kids are like these beings, you’re watching them evolve into who they are. So people always ask me like, ‘How are you going to talk to them about it?’ I’m like, I have no idea. I will cross that bridge when I get there.”
For more on the stars of The Girls Next Door, then and now, keep reading.
Kendra Wilkinson
Kendra Wilkinson was one of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner‘s three live-in girlfriends when the show premiered in 2005. Fans were so invested in Wilkinson that she got her own spin-off show, Kendra, on E! after leaving the series in 2009.
Her subsequent WE tv series, Kendra On Top, which followed her journey as a mother of two, son Hank IV (born Sept. 11, 2009) and daughter Alijah (May 16, 2014), and her marriage to NFL player Hank Baskett, who she swapped vows with at the Playboy Mansion on June 27, 2009.
The couple split up in 2018 and their divorce was finalized the following year. In 2021, Kendra got a real estate license and launched her own Discovery+ series, Kendra Sells Hollywood.
Bridget Marquardt
From investigating the mansion’s possible haunted past to planning Hef’s birthday, Bridget was No. 1. Her skin was ready to be shown on the Travel Channel’s Bridget’s Sexiest Beaches and she had cameos in the likes of Entourage, The House Bunny and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Bridget’s interest in the paranormal has come full circle as host of the podcast Ghost Bunny, featuring interviews with celebs who’ve experienced the unexplainable and other deep dives into various unsolved mysteries with the help of experts. She also began hosting the Girls Next Level podcast with Holly Madison in 2022.
Once part of an iconic trio, she happily paired off long ago with partner Nicholas Carpenter.
Holly Madison
Holly Madison had a successful career after her tenure at the Playboy Mansion, including competing on Dancing with the Stars before getting her own show, Holly’s World, that centered around her career in Las Vegas, including her Peepshow residency.
She published a revealing memoir about her time in the Playboy Mansion, Down theRabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former PlayboyBunny, in 2015, chasing that it with 2016’s The Vegas Diaries: Romance, Rolling the Dice and the Road to Reinvention.
The longtime PETA advocate is mom to daughter Rainbow (March 5, 2013) and son Forest (Aug. 7, 2016) with ex-husband Pasquale Rotella.
In addition to participating in the scathing A&E docuseries Secrets of Playboy, she described having a complicated relationship with her Girl Next Door costars on a 2021 episode of the podcast Call Her Daddy. “Bridget and I have always been close,” she said. “We’ve always been friends since day one. She is [the sweetest].” When asked if she had a relationship with Kendra, Holly tersely replied, “No.”
Indeed, Holly proves her and Bridget’s bond each week on the Girls Next Level podcast.
Crystal Harris
While all of the ladies of The Girls Next Door had a special place in Hefner’s heart, Crystal Harris actually married the Playboy mogul in 2012, the then-86-year-old’s third trip down the aisle. They remained together until his death in 2017.
After Holly spoke out about her relationship with her costars, Crystal was quick to pick a side. “I was at the mansion for a DECADE almost four years ago now and these ladies and their drama were there years before that,” she wrote on her MeWe account. “So much time has passed. I side with Kendra here.”
“Not sure why these women who shared an incredibly uncommon and rare experience (that will never be repeated in our lifetimes) can’t get along?” she continued. “Maybe for the same reasons Holly and Bridget despise me for absolutely NO reason. I hope one day we can all get along and compare experiences.”
Crystal also became an advocate for Lyme disease awareness after announcing she’d been diagnosed with the illness in 2016.
In 2024, she debuted her relationship with Jim Ward and announced she would be reverting back to using her maiden name after going by Crystal Hefner following her 2012 nuptials.
“I’m in a much better place,” Crystal told E! News, seven years after Hugh’s death. “Next step is definitely going back to my original last name and finally taking that last step to just be myself.”
Kristina Shannon and Karissa Shannon
After the first generation of The Girls Next Door girlfriends left, twins Kristina Shannon and Karissa Shannon moved into the Playboy Mansion in 2009. During the remaining seasons, they celebrated their Playboy Summer Issue in Vegas, went camping in the backyard with Hef and prepared for bit parts in Sofia Coppola‘s Chateau Marmont-set movie Somewhere.
After the show wrapped, Kristina and Karissa joined the ninth season of Celebrity Big Brother and opened a beauty salon in Los Angeles.
However, the sisters eventually moved to Ann Arbor, Mich.
“Kristina and I decided to move,” Karissa told People in 2025. “We didn’t know where to go, so we decided to go back to where we were born and leave L.A.”
