The Simple Lie (Commentary)

I was all prepared to hate “The Simple Life.”

The first commercial I saw about the Fox Television show filmed in Altus featured Paris Hilton pretending she had never heard of Wal-Mart.

“What do they sell there, things for your walls?” asked the Hilton hotel heiress.

Yeah, right. Why do these people have to come here and make fun of our little retail companies?

Having a small bit of television experience (I was once an extra in a Hanes underwear commercial), I decided I’d better watch “The Simple Life” at least once before firing off a nasty letter to anybody at Fox who could read.

So I caught one of the first episodes, and although parts of it were predictably stupid, it was a little different from what I expected. Arkansas didn’t get slammed. The little rich girls-turned-Arkansas farm bunnies — Hilton and Nicole Richie, daughter of singer Lionel Richie — seemed to be working hard to be brats. After all, this is Fox, and who’s going to watch if they just sit around on the farm milking cows?

The show made fun of Hilton and Richie more than it did Arkansas. Altus seemed like Every Little Town, U.S.A. But what came through more than anything else was that these girls were acting — playing to the cameras that followed them 24 hours a day. They were really more down to Earth than Fox would want anybody to believe from reading the PR onslaught that preceded this series. But that’s what makes them endearing in the show. If they weren’t likable on some level, nobody would watch it.

And the Leding family? They came off looking like a model of the perfect American family — an Ozzie and Harriet for the aughts. The father, Albert, is respectable, intelligent, articulate and caring. I’m going to write him in for president of the United States.

If anything is wrong with this family, they’re just a bit too protective of the L.A. celebutantes living in their midst, but maybe they’re supposed to be. I mean, how’s it going to look if the girls run off with the wrong kind of people, like some goat ropers from Dardanelle or chicken sexers from the Tyson Foods plant in Pottsville?

I watched “The Simple Life Reunion Show” on Jan. 13. It was filmed in Altus with 300 locals in the audience and Leeza Gibbons as hostess. Gibbons seemed genuinely embarrassed after a slip of the tongue when she asked Hilton’s Altus boyfriend, “How are you going to go back to the farm after you’ve had Paree?”

Good question.

During the reunion show, Fox showed several clips from the series, and I was amazed at how close it appeared the girls had gotten to the Ledings. With power tools in hand, they built a wooden fort for the Ledings’ little boy. When they unveiled it to him, the moment was downright touching.

In the final episode, the Ledings and the girls seem genuinely sad when Hilton and Richie leave Altus for L.A.

Word around Hollywood is that “The Simple Life” was such a hit that producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray (“The Real World,” “Road Rules”) are wracking their brains trying to figure out how to do a “Simple Life II” for the next season. The show has been attracting 12 million viewers a week. Will Hilton and Richie want to spend a few more months in Altus? We’ll see.

I once had a friend from Virginia who attended acting school in Los Angeles. He told me that, when he met a girl from L.A., any girl from L.A., he immediately knew she would have nothing to say. His theory was that people who grew up in Los Angeles lacked texture: They didn’t have the cultural baggage that made Southerners interesting, complex, quirky, insecure and prone to insanity. Without all that, what kind of conversationalist could a person be? Heck, Californians don’t even know the difference between a conniption fit and a hissy fit.

“The Simple Life” is really a study of culture. It’s about the cultural differences between the rich in California and the regular folks in Arkansas. It’s probably not what Fox intended, but these different cultures don’t seem so different to me after watching a couple of episodes of “The Simple Life.” And both groups come out looking better as a result of the television show.

In the long run, “The Simple Life” may even be good for tourism in Arkansas. I think I’ll write those people at Fox and demand a second season.