Want to kill a concept? It’s ‘Simple’

That’s quite a witness-protection program of comedy bits the makers of “The Simple Life: Interns” have created for their stars, glazed-over rich girls Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

In the new installment, Paris and Nicole travel the East Coast by bus, doing a series of what the show calls “internships” -- at a muffler shop, a mortuary, a hospital and a palm reader’s. I didn’t know you could get an internship with a palm reader. This is the problem with an unscripted show whose premise is no longer fresh -- it begins to show its scriptedness in situations clearly planned to top the last gag the writers came up with. In this madly overproduced show with no one on camera longer than they need to be for the joke to play out, how can Paris be Paris?

I understand why she makes some people mad -- that whole famous-for-being-famous thing, with a wag-the-dog PR strategy that involves putting out a book or a TV show around random acts of premeditated misbehavior designed to get the tabloids swirling and perpetuate another 15 minutes. The empty-headed privilege she and Richie exude on “The Simple Life” is a joke on somebody, although the target moves. In the first one, the producers put Paris and Nicole on a farm in Arkansas, turned on the cameras and watched to see who would be humiliated more, the red-state folks being mocked or our dull-eyed little rich girl vulgarians (I’m not sure, but I think it was a draw). That six-episode arc back at the end of 2003, in which we saw Paris and Nicole forsake their credit cards and cellphones without actually going into rehab, worked because the girls were still innocents as TV characters. Privileged and stupid and vacuous, and maybe even to be partially blamed for the corrosion of our culture, yes, but with one key question, central to this era of ours, left unexamined: Would their gifts work as a TV construct?

They would, it turned out, but now Paris and Nicole are all self-aware and overly overexposed, and we no longer have the luxury of being horrified. We’re pre-horrified, and the producers have loaded this third “Simple Life” (“SL2: Road Trip” aired last summer) with situations that are pre-scripted and pre-vetted and then edited for maximum joke potential. I suppose this wouldn’t be a problem if Fox would just go ahead and call this a sitcom, but they don’t. They call it reality. And they call you the rube.

Paris and Nicole are on hand, but in the first episode you hardly hear a peep out of either of them unless it’s in the service of a joke, nor do we see them in anything like real time.

“Is Jersey a city or a state?” Nicole asks Paris. They’re on a Greyhound bus out of Manhattan bound for the home of a New Jersey family whose lives will be turned upside down (after family members have signed release forms detailing that their lives will be turned upside down and met with the show’s writers and producers and maybe even been given some Fox swag -- who knows?).

Paris and Nicole and their 12 pieces of luggage and three dogs arrive, and by now, with the newness of the “Legally Blonde,” fish-out-of-water premise played out, it’s like watching Foreigner pull into the Nassau Coliseum on a reunion tour (right now, somewhere in Beverly Hills or Bel-Air or Pacific Palisades, two teenage girls are telling each other they’re way more entertaining than Paris and Nicole, and they’re right).

The first “internship” is at a muffler shop (once again, the ceremonial signing of the release forms happens off camera), and Paris and Nicole quickly make nuisances of themselves. Nicole backs a Honda into the fender of another car, twice. Pointing under the hood of a car whose oil they have to change, Paris asks, “Which one’s the engine?”

In the comedy business, this is what’s known as a call-back, for in the first “Simple Life,” Paris asked, “What are wells for?” and “What’s a Wal-Mart?”

There is one good exchange between them, when Paris and Nicole are about to perform an oil change and Paris asks her of their faux-jobs, “So is this blue collar or white collar?” “I think blue collar,” Nicole replies. “And white collar’s better?” Paris asks. “White’s, like, office,” Nicole says.

Staying in the moment of a show like this, or “The Osbournes” (remember them?) or the Jessica Simpson-Nick Lachey show “The Newlyweds,” which both start up again this week, involves believing the stars and producers are still unaware of what they have on their hands, exactly. Only then does the show give off the sense of spontaneity and freakishness (see: VH1’s “Strange Love”) that these shows need to have.

But once they become popular and recognized and talked about -- once they become known to both the participants and the audience -- the whole thing tends to devolve into the kind of reflexive self-mockery that makes you think, “Next.”

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‘The Simple Life: Interns’

Where: Fox

When: 9-10 p.m.

Ratings: TV-PG-DL (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for suggestive dialogue and coarse language)

Paris Hilton...self

Nicole Richie...self

Executive producer Jonathan Murray.