The Simple Life
Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie give up their cell phones and credit cards to live with a farm family in Altus, Arkansas, and fail at every job they are given. The premiere on December 2, 2003 drew 13 million viewers to Fox, and the show ran five seasons across two networks, surviving even the stars' real-life falling-out.
The Simple Life started in Fox's comedy department, not its reality department. Brad Johnson, the network's senior vice president of comedy development, had been challenged to find a way to do comedy outside the sitcom format, and the answer was to take a high-concept 1960s sitcom and "do them for real." The model was Green Acres, the show about a New York society couple on a farm. At the same time, the studio's casting executive Sharon Klein had met Paris Hilton and wanted to build a show around her. "They wanted to see stilettos in cow shit," Klein said. Hilton's sister Nicky passed on the idea, and Hilton ended up making the deal with her friend Nicole Richie.
Bunim/Murray, the producers of The Real World, shot the first season in April and May 2003 with the Leding family in Altus, Arkansas, a small town known for its vineyards. The premiere on December 2, 2003 drew 13 million viewers and lifted Fox's rating among adults 18 to 49 by 79 percent. Altus had hoped to get a new fire station out of the deal; it received $15,000 and about 450 DVDs of the first season. The formula changed every year. Season two sent the pair across the country in a pink pickup truck pulling an Airstream trailer, season three gave them internships along the East Coast, season four had them take turns playing the wife in a different family each episode, and season five made them counselors at Camp Shawnee.
In 2005 Hilton confirmed that she and Richie were no longer friends, and Fox cancelled its plans for more seasons that October. E! picked the show up on November 28, 2005, and the fourth-season premiere in June 2006 drew 1.3 million viewers, more than four times the channel's prime-time average. E! ended it on July 30, 2007, and the last episode aired on August 5. "It's been a great five years and we had so much fun," Hilton said that night, "but I'm happy to end it at that."
Critics mostly admitted it worked. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus called it "an incredibly vapid show, but there is no denying that Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are downright entertaining," and the format was remade in several countries.
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