Work for a living? What a concept

“The Simple Life,” the new Fox reality show that lets us watch as hotel heiress Paris Hilton and pop star daughter Nicole Richie spend a month roughing it on a farm in Altus, Ark. (pop. 817), is the latest in a series of televised glimpses into the lives of the filthy rich and fatuous. How much fun is it? Oh, very. You can imagine. And it’s educational too.

A would-be real-life version of the classic sitcom “Green Acres,” “The Simple Life” purports to show what happens when two spoiled, out-of-control members of the insanely privileged classes agree to divest themselves of cash, credit and cellular technology and submit, for our viewing pleasure, to shoveling roadkill, shopping for pig’s feet and sharing a single bathroom with all seven members of the Leding family.

Having been delayed four times since its completion (“The Simple Life” was originally scheduled to air in mid-August but was held to make the most of the positive buzz surrounding it), the show has by now been preceded by at least two projects in a similar vein, not to mention a season full of peeks into the lives of the shamelessly rich. The sincere and well-intentioned HBO documentary “Born Rich,” in which Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson plumbed the inner lives of heirs from an insider’s vantage point, shed some light on the rarefied neuroses of the top 1 percentile. The results were unflattering enough to inspire litigation.

MTV’s “Rich Girls,” which follows designer Tommy Hilfiger’s daughter Ally and her petulant friend Jaime Gleicher as they shop, dawdle and weigh in on important issues like hunger on the subcontinent and Eastern philosophy, has given its stars more than enough rope with which to hang themselves. And this they dutifully do. The rich girls of the title may be oblivious to how funny they sound when they talk about “treat[ing] the garbage man the same way you treat the Queen of England” while being chauffeured around New York in a limousine, but the irony is not lost on the MTV drones responsible for coming up with such headlines as “Ben Franklin Invented the Light Bulb: Watch Rich Girls Rewrite History” for the network Web site. (The jab refers to Gleicher’s unfortunate conflation of Franklin and Edison while sunning herself on Hilfiger’s Mustique estate. Apparently, you can lead a ditz to a top-notch private school, but you can’t make her synapses fire.)

Similarly, the infamous Kozlowski toga-party tapes may not have been devised as mass entertainment, but they provided some of the most satisfying laughs of the season.

Given its precedents, it’s no surprise that the premise of “The Simple Life” feels as if it could have been devised as a forum for public excoriation. Which it is, sort of. But the show also manages to turn an absurd romp in the Ozarks into an intranational cultural exchange program that reveals more about America and the illusions on which it depends than all of the previous “inside” looks combined.

Fresh from twin scandals (Richie was busted for heroin possession earlier this year and recently spent time in rehab, and Hilton enjoyed even more exposure than usual when footage of her having sex with then-boyfriend Rick Salomon surfaced on the Internet), the girls are primed for punishment.

And there’s something especially devious and schadenfreude-y about putting Hilton and Richie in situations that would make most viewers of the show blanch. (You don’t have to be rich to balk at the notion of eating fried squirrel.) In the end, the girls’ blithe participation in Fox’s latest clash of the social classes winds up shedding more light on the disconnect between deeply ingrained American attitudes toward work and its rewards than anything else.

Predictably, some of the show’s best moments showcase Hilton’s ignorance of all things humble, rural and labor-intensive. When their grocery bill exceeds the amount of cash they’ve been given by about $15, for instance, she can’t believe the cashier won’t just let them have the extra merchandise for free. “This isn’t a soup kitchen,” he says. In the parking lot, she asks her friend, “What is that, a ‘soup kitchen’?” Later, she stuns both the Ledings and the somewhat more down-to-earth Richie by confessing her complete unawareness of this place they refer to as Wal-Mart. “Do they sell wall stuff?” she asks.

Yet, despite its wickedly contrived and booby-trapped fish-out-of-water premise, “The Simple Life” is also the only show to pit American privilege against American poverty and let them duke it out for our sympathies. (Shows like “Joe Millionaire” don’t count, as they rely on the social tone-deafness of equally marginal “bachelorettes” in order to work.)

Hilton and Richie play up the gulf between their lives and the Ledings’ by performing their menial tasks dressed in low-slung jeans (so low slung, in fact, as to require a strategically placed digital blur), rimless Gucci sunglasses and high heels and actively court trouble, just as they do at home. Hilton has admitted that she and Richie purposefully bungled their jobs in the interest of creating memorable TV moments. Still, watching them rise at 5 a.m. to milk cows or dress up as promotional milkshakes for a fast food chain, it’s obvious they wouldn’t exactly have excelled had they tried their best given their particular skill sets. (It takes some talent just to be Paris Hilton.)

What’s really surprising about the “The Simple Life” has less to do with the girls’ limited talent for milking cows or flipping burgers than it does with the Ledings’ incapacity or unwillingness to fathom the gulf between the girls’ reality and their own, despite the evidence available to them.

“[Work] helps them to develop and know that they have to work later in life to make it,” Janet, the family matriarch, tells the camera after the girls are fired from the dairy farm, as her husband looks grimly on.

Soon afterward, Hilton reveals that she has some friends who work for a living, and she “feels bad” about it.

Knowing how peripheral the idea of “making it” is to the girls’ lives (at least in the sense that Janet means), it starts to feel like the ultimate joke of “The Simple Life” is not so much on the romping princesses as it is on everyone else.

“Whatever it is you girls are looking for in life, I hope you find it,” says the angry dairy farmer, unable to resist a parting barb.

“Thank you,” Richie says sweetly, not getting the irony. Wouldn’t it be terrible if they already had?

*

“The Simple Life”

Where: Fox

When: Parts 1 and 2, today and Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. Continues Tuesdays, 8:30-9 p.m.

Rating: The network has rated the show TV-PG-D,L (may not be suitable for young children, with advisories for suggestive dialogue and coarse language).

Featuring: Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie

Executive producers Mary-Ellis Bunim, Jonathan Murray