Note: FOX website with videos of Paris Hilton in new "The Simple Life" reality TV series:

http://www.fox.com/simplelife/

DESCRIPTION & ARTICLE ABOUT "THE SIMPLE LIFE"

Here's how the network describes the series:

The show follows hotel heiress PARIS HILTON and her best friend NICOLE RICHIE, daughter of legendary pop icon Lionel Richie, as they leave behind the comforts of their lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles for a chance to live THE SIMPLE LIFE. Armed with a Louis Vuitton bag and a teacup chihuahua named Tinkerbell, Hilton and Richie move in with the hardworking Leding family in Altus, AR (pop. 817). Seven family members. Three generations. Two celebutantes. One bathroom. Together they add up to one hilarious half-hour.

The outrageous series focuses on Hilton and Richie, who must roll up their Chanel sleeves and get their manicured hands dirty as they try to adjust and fit into a world far different from their own. From cleaning chicken coops and pumping gas to hitting the town and picking up guys, Hilton and Richie make waves as this provocative fish-out-of-water series unfolds. The pampered princesses once famous for dancing on tables will now have to clean them. From the inner circle to the quilting circle, the burning questions still remain: Will they survive THE SIMPLE LIFE, and will this small town survive them?

Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray ("The Real World," "Road Rules")
are executive producers of THE SIMPLE LIFE, which is a 20th Century
Fox Television production in association with Bunim-Murray.

==============================================
Source: Chicago Sun-Times at suntimes.com

SEE WHAT PARIS HILTON DOES WITH FARM ANIMALS

November 19, 2003
BY PHIL ROSENTHAL, TELEVISION CRITIC

So a Paris Hilton tape winds up on my desk. Just my luck it's one where she keeps her clothes on, so you actually wind up focusing on what the airhead heiress has to say.

Which isn't much at all.

Having seen a couple of episodes of "A Simple Life," a new quasi-reality series from Fox, let me suggest that the homemade porn shot in green-tinted night vision by a former lover and distributed to perverts in every corner of the World Wide Web may be the less degrading of the two tapes Hilton has in circulation.

It can't be good for the hotel business from which she and her family derive their great wealth for the world to see that this Paris Hilton is so vacant.

"A Simple Life" is a "Green Acres"-like contrivance from the producers of MTV's "The Real World," dumping Hilton and her equally vacuous pal, Nicole Richie, daughter of singer Lionel Richie, onto a gracious, hospitable small-town Arkansas farm family that deserves better as their houseguests teeter from amusingly stupid to downright contemptible.

The short-run series doesn't debut until Dec. 2, but Fox's relentless prime-time promotion of the series already has piqued considerable curiosity -- curiosity being a sensation seemingly foreign to these "celebutante" party girls who are forced to make do without credit cards, cell phones and their usual umbilical support as they play 30-day tourists in the real world.

It could be worse for Hilton and Richie, who are fortunate to be born wealthy in that they seem to be hothouse flowers utterly ill-suited for reality. In relocating from Beverly Hills, 90210, to Altus, Arkansas. 72821 (population 817), they could be forced to live on their wits alone, which would result in a very brief series indeed.

These two go to the grocery store, and neither one of them knows what "generic" means.

They've never heard of a "soup kitchen."

Hilton one-ups MTV genius Jessica Simpson's famous recent inquiry about whether Chicken of the Sea Tuna is actually chicken by asking: "What is Wal-Mart? Is it like they sell wall stuff?"

Of course, just agreeing to do "A Simple Life" makes Hilton suspect. (Her sister Nicky wisely decided early on she wanted no part of this spectacle, opening a slot for Richie.) If the point of the exercise is self-promotion by the erstwhile gal pal of Bears (Pro Football) linebacker Brian Urlacher, to what end? Simpson at least has her own CDs to sell with her own reality series MTV's "Newlyweds."

"A Simple Life" tends to present Hilton (whose butt cleavage is tastefully blurred by the uncharacteristically alert Fox censors) and Richie (who, since completing the TV series, entered a drug-diversion program after pleading guilty to a felony heroin-possession charge) as simpletons.

Initially these two addled spendthrifts come across merely as benign examples of the idiot rich. By the end of Episode 2, their brattishness has you recalling Marie Antoinette and wondering how long it would take to get a guillotine carted in to the center of Altus. Too often, they come across as monumental clods whose colossal ignorance is matched only by their insensitivity.

OK, so they've never worked a day in their lives, and dairy work is tough. Do these two really need to undermine the poor fool duped into hiring them for our amusement?

Watching them water down his customers' milk to avoid having to fill all the assigned bottles and plant themselves on his living- room couch when they're supposed to be working is meant to be seen as funny, not sad or infuriating. Never mind that they act slightly indignant when he sends them home and pays them $42 each for the six hours they sort of worked.

As entertaining as it can be to watch Hilton and Richie flounder and throw out the occasional moronic observation -- "Who knew you could wake up a cow with a bell?" one of the two says when handed a cowbell -- it would be nice to think that Hilton and Richie eventually come away from this experience a little wiser.

That would be a lot more interesting than wondering how they're going to keep Paris down on the farm once she's seen Wal-Mart.

Source: villagevoice.com

Surrendering Their Credit Cards for TV Fame, Debutantes Dabble at the Dairy Farm
by Joy Press
November 21st, 2003

Most reality series revolve around the idea of making fools out of regular folk who'll do anything to win love or money. It was only a matter of time before producers figured out that it might be even more fun to abase the affluent. Enter The Simple Life and Rich Girls, a ratings duel between East Coast and West Coast princesses. Supremely watchable, these shows nevertheless make for ambivalent entertainment: I'm not sure if I'm supposed to laugh at the girls, envy them, or guillotine them.

The premise of Rich Girls is straightforward: We spy on two wealthy teenagers, Ally Hilfiger (daughter of designer Tommy) and Jaime Gleicher (daughter of some rich noncelebrity), going about their ordinary lives. Of course, as with the Osbournes, ordinary life is fairly extraordinary for these nouveau riche Manhattan mini-socialites—they swan from boutique to salon to party, and from one Hilfiger mansion to the next. Highlights include Ally vomiting off the side of her yacht and Jaime's failed scheme to lose her virginity before prom night (amped up on coffee, her date gets so nervous he throws up). Just like Sharon Osbourne, the show's teenage stars have producer credits, which makes it even more puzzling why they'd open themselves up to this kind of self-exposure and ridicule.

Stuck in the role of dumpy sidekick, Jaime lopes around with a scowl permanently etched on her face; at 18, she already exudes the aura of a disappointed middle-aged matron. She spreads adolescent angst over every available surface—whether it's pining for a teenage cad who chooses a younger, prettier girl over her, or guilt-tripping over her wealth. Listening to the girls discuss class and justify their prosperity is one of the more revelatory aspects of Rich Girls. During a heart-to-heart talk at Ally's Caribbean mansion, Jaime suggests that although they've never lifted a finger, maybe they earned their luck in a past life: "We must have done something really good for us to have the privileges that we do. Benjamin Franklin was born on my birthday, Muhammad Ali was born on my birthday—like, maybe I was one of them." That doesn't mean they're beyond noblesse oblige traditions like fundraising. Their current cause is Ethiopians; as Ally points out, "They're so malnutritional." The couple decide to ask their friends to contribute money to charity instead of buying $400 Manolos. "What is more important," Ally asks passionately, "a pair of stupid shoes or a life?"

Ally and Jamie at least have some inkling of their good fortune. The stars of The Simple Life—hotel heiress Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, daughter of Lionel—exude nothing beyond a monstrous sense of entitlement. After watching the first two episodes, I felt like calling for Hilton's fake-tanned head on a stick—but as anyone who has seen the sex tape knows, her body already is a stick. At one point in The Simple Life, the camera goes blurry to conceal her butt crack, because her denim hip-huggers have slipped off her nonexistent hips. As Ally would say, she's downright malnutritional.

The concept of The Simple Life sounded like Punk'd for debutantes: two Beverly Hills publicity 'hos banished to a small farm in Altus, Arkansas, for 30 days. Who wouldn't want to see these fashionistas shoveling cow dung, flipping burgers, and suffering from spa-withdrawal pangs? The debut episode pushes all the right buttons as the young women meet their salt-of-the-earth host family, the Ledings. The expected culture clash ensues. Grandma Curly Leding (whose tall hair resembles a graying meringue) grumbles about the duo's risqué clothing. The girls immediately shirk their chores, refusing to help pluck the freshly slaughtered chickens that Curly's preparing for dinner. "I-swear-I'll-puke," Paris threatens.

Although they claim they want to experience "how the other half lives," the duo spends most of the two episodes I've seen doing anything but that. They ignore the Leding's house rules and get fired from their first ever job—at a dairy farm—after just one day. They're also consistently condescending and sometimes plain rude to their hosts: "I couldn't imagine living here. I would die," Paris tells the family on their first night.

Yet it becomes obvious as you watch The Simple Life that Hilton and Richie are not the butt of the joke—they're in on it. Paris acts like she's never heard of Wal-Mart ("Do they sell stuff for walls?"), but later admits she was camping it up. Nicole's dumb-blonde act has a chilling, artificial edge to it: When the duo runs up a supermarket bill larger than what the Ledings budget, Nicole emits a vacuous giggle and asks the cashier, "Can we just have it?"

The producers—The Real World creators Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jon Murray—set the show up to mock the girls' decadent ways, but they also egged them on to be outrageous. Take the terrible twosome's brief stint as minimum-wage workers at the dairy farm. Clad in designer combat gear and fluorescent trucker caps, they spill half the milk they're squirting into bottles, cheat by diluting the milk with water, then start hiding bottles to make it look like they've finished. It's a madcap scene that could've come straight out of I Love Lucy. Which is more or less what they were briefed to replicate, judging by this Hollywood Reporter quote from producer Jon Murray: "From the beginning, I told Paris and Nicole, 'This is Lucy and Ethel.' . . . We went into it thinking of it as a comedy."

It's a peculiarly uncomfortable kind of comedy, though, as we watch Paris and Nicole more or less run roughshod over their hosts and their working-class community. Like The Cat in the Hat's Thing One and Thing Two, they are greedy gremlins devoted to pleasure at any cost. Sitting on the porch gossiping about the family's teenage son Justin, the girls concede that he's very sweet. "Yeah," Nicole continues with a gale of vixenish laughter, "we should have a threesome with him!" The next night they break Mr. Leding's curfew and sneak off to a local bar looking for some hot hick action. Considering Paris's current sex tape scandal and Nicole's arrest for heroin possession (she was busted and let out on bail just before the series was filmed), these Miss Things might do well to learn some lessons in simplicity.