The Simple Life

I'd forgotten how much of an improvement season 2 was over it's predecessor until I purchased it just the other evening at Best Buy for an unbelievably low $6.99! What a breath of fresh air to be taken off the farm and out of the dead-end town of Altus! It's so fun to watch these two girls in action as they breeze into the lives of unsuspecting "regular folk" and turn their lives upside down. It's outrageous to watch what they're able to get away with, but it makes you wonder how much of it is actually orchestrated. While I love the show, one thing I find most annoying is the reactions of the people that invite Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie to perform these jobs. Come on, being surprised when they inevitably either screw the job up or blow it off altogether is like being surprised when Britney Spears shows her belly button - it's expected! I'm sorry, if I was a manager or proprietor of a business, as much as I adore these girls, if I valued my position as manager or my business I wouldn't allow them within 100 yards.

I think people put way too much effort into being overly-critical of this show. It's fluffy and doesn't require any thought to watch it. It's pure, unadulterated fun, and it's a wonderful escape. Now, I like movies and television shows that make you think as much as the next guy, but, tell the truth, don't you just want to sit back sometimes and watch a show that doesn't require you to use any brain power at all?

Nearly every review of the Simple Life misses its essence -- its a staged show. ALL reality shows are in fact staged, with a script. The "reality" part is a bit of improv. allowance, and the illusion that its really happening.

The Simple Life is just as staged as the Lucy show in that generation. Most of the jokes are already written. All the bits, even down to Nicole's purse getting stolen, are staged. If the girls did some of this stuff in real life, they know they would at least get a misdemeanor offense. Instead, a little town is signed up to play along with the jokes and pretend.

The moral condemnation of Paris and Nicole, as spoiled rich girls with low IQs, is just what the producers want adults to think. Any kid with a brain knows they are just goofing off, and its no more real than the Three Stooges. Relax, folks, the stealing and lying and screw ups are all jokes.

With a show like this it's hard to tell how much is actual reality and how much are scripted scenerios.

Either way Paris and Nicole come off pretty bad. They're totally rude and condesending to the towns people. They get to run around like retards with no consequences.

These two idiots obviously aren't the representative of what everybody is like in L.A. There's a wide variety of areas and people in Southern California.

Nicole says she's never seen anything like the farm area she was on. I guess she's never traveled up the 5 north. Or been to the Equestrian area in Burbank, just a mile down the road from NBC studios.

Paris surely can't be so dense as to never have heard of Wal-Mart. Granted there's more K-Marts than Wal-Marts in Southern California, but still you think she would have at least heard of the company.

Although I, largely, agree with most of the basic criticisms offered by other reviewers, I could not help but feel a certain sympathy for Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie and having some sense that, beneath their often obnoxious, misguided, and generally uninformed behavior; both ladies were fundamentally warm hearted and WANTED to be decent, if only they knew HOW to be so. Perhaps that is a naive assessment, on my part, given that they (and the residents of Altus) had to play to the cameras, to a certain extent, and that may have distorted everyone's more natural behavior. Still, (unless I was COMPLETELY deceived), the series looked like a cautionary tale of what often befalls clueless children of inherited wealth. The girls seemed to have been imprisoned in a cocoon of insular ignorance that crippled their capacity to function in a world structured more on self reliance and, perhaps, their parents owe them an apology for not teaching them the way Warren Buffett taught HIS children?

Everyone has their opinions on this show. You either love it or hate it. Personally, I love it. It's a piece of harmless fun. A funny show with exaggerated concepts and unrealistic motives. But lovable all the same. If you take The Simple Life as simply just fun, then it's a great show. If you read into it, and examine every single aspect, it's not so great.

When it comes down to it, The Simple Life is fake. They want you to believe these girls (Paris Hilton & Nicole Richie), have been stripped of everything that's important to them (money, credit cards, cell phones etc...)When in fact that's not the case. When you see pictures of them and the title reads "On set of The Simple Life" - that pretty much says it all. It's not supposed to be set up, it's supposed to be real. Is it scripted? Of course. Should it be, given the description of the show? No, it shouldn't.

The BIGGEST thing that gives this away is the editing. It's awful. Throughout the course of the season, you see the girls wearing the exact same outfits, hairstyles, looking exactly the same as previous episodes. And something tells me Paris & Nicole don't wear the exact same thing (EXACT TO A T), as previous weeks ago. It's so obvious none of it is real. So, I guess if you notice this, then yeah.. it's a fake show. Not reality.

When they say at the end of the finale "Yeah! We did it." They want you to believe they survived a month without their beloved credit cards, when really the truth is "Yeah, we finished filming."