Mon, December 8, 2003

So far, I'm enjoying Fox's The Simple Life, and I swear I had already planned to TiVo it before the sexual videotapes of Paris Hilton surfaced. Two things surprised me about the show when it debuted last week, and those are the reasons that – for now – I'm staying with it.

One is that the protagonists are not who I expected. I thought that we (as an audience) were intended to identify with the Arkansas farming family, rolling our eyes at the ditzy, prissy girls from Hollywood. Instead, I find myself identifying with Paris and Nicole most of the time. Maybe not to the full extent, but I definitely see their point. While they're incredulous that anyone could actually live in the conditions they see on the farm, I'm at least relieved that I don't. The show does a fairly good job of portraying the family as honest, hard-working, and proud. It doesn't look down on them, and it doesn't draw lines along a strictly rich/poor separation. As a result, at least in the footage we see, I don't think the girls look at it that way either. They're not squealing at "poor folk," they're squealing at plucking chickens or sleeping on a crudely walled-in porch.

Second is that Paris and Nicole seem to be laughing at themselves and their predicament at least half of the time. Again, I expected them to be prissy and bitchy all the time, looking down their nose at their host family. Instead, they seem to be reacting to how gravely unprepared they are for their adventure. Before leaving L.A., they talk big about how phenomenally they plan to succeed on their trip. Clearly, they have no concept of what's in store. It turns out that they don't watch nearly as much television as I thought, because they're genuinely unprepared for just about everything they encounter. But at least they're good-humored about it. I suppose that's a result of their pampered upbringing; they've always been attended to by genuflecting yes-men, so there's never been a reason to be shy or self-conscious. Their total disconnect from reality is startling, though. (I mean, Paris has never heard of Wal-Mart?) It paints a picture of the super-rich for which I was completely unprepared.

And that's kind of where the show succeeds. By placing us in the middle, between the two "classes" (for want of a better term). Our concept of subsistence is much less back-breaking than that of the farming family, and much more active than that of Paris and Nicole. It's an opportunity to learn a lot about what we take for granted, by viewing those who don't have it to take for granted – and those who have never even heard of it. (Paris and Nicole simply take for granted that we take these things for granted. I think.)

The show breaks down into a few key areas, and I think it's a mistake to allow those to blend together. There's work, opportunity, quality of life, and entertainment. Work is a situation for which the girls simply are not prepared. The show starts them off on a dairy farm, which is a little extreme. These girls simply don't understand what work is, why people do it, or what it means. They don't understand the concept of each link in the chain depending on the others. So – as a result of a hasty indoctrination into their duties, which leaves them bewildered – they inevitably screw up, and then start cheating to try to avoid a reprimand. They don't understand that if they water down the milk, the buyer will be held accountable to the stores where he tries to sell his milk. They don't draw a connection between cows being milked in a barn and milk on their dinner table or in their tea cakes. To them, it's like any other reality-show challenge – they have to get through it as best they can, and once it's over, it's over. As such, it's a joke, and they don't treat it seriously. I think they should've started with a job like the one at Sonic, where the tasks are a little more clearly defined and the consequences for ineptitude are a bit more immediate.

Entertainment will be coming up next week, when the girls head out on the town, and opportunity has only been brushed upon so far, when they had to go shopping and were forced to come to terms with the fact that items cost money and therefore certain things were beyond their grasp. The main area that's been explored so far, alongside work, is quality of life. Eating hand-plucked chicken off of styrofoam plates, sharing a tiny bathroom with the entire family – no jacuzzi tub! – and dealing with bugs who creep in from the gaps in the wood-paneling walls, the girls suffer a rude awakening at just how rustic life can be. As I said before, I attribute their constant giggling in this area to "Look at us! We had no idea! What were we thinking?" and so it's kind of endearing.

I think that many viewers would be tempted to amalgamate the girls' responses to the work and the quality of life, and view them as bitchy snobs. However, I don't think that's fair. They're different areas, and the girls react differently. In my opinion, they seem to have a generally open mind when it comes to just about everything, but they're not cut out to handle manual labor or take it very seriously. If you set those scenes aside, the girls really seem to warm to their hosts, and the show speaks to the underlying humanity that spans all lifestyles and backgrounds. When they're hanging out with the toddler boy, Nicole and Paris really seem comfortable, and it's cute to watch.

By the way, I should note that I'm not giving the girls a break because I think they're hot. As I may have mentioned before, I find Paris gangly and wan. I mean, you can take "slender" too far. And with her monotone, she sounds wasted all the time. She looks great in low-rise jeans, but she's nowhere near my top 50. And Nicole comes off as a sort of servile hanger-on. It's the Paris Show featuring Nicole. (Mostly this is a construction of the show and its marketing, but still.)

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