Séamas O'Reilly: The Simple Life's return harkens back to the weirdness of the mid-2000s
Paris Hilton arrives at the 65th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 5, 2023, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton were seen filming scenes for a reboot of The Simple Life last week, amid news that the mid-00s reality show that made their names was staging a comeback.
This has been warmly received by fans who miss the show, as well as those who’ve backed Hilton during the reappraisal of her reputation we’ve seen in recent years.
I can’t say I feel much one way or the other about the prospect of The Simple Life’s return, but I’ll take any chance to explore the deeply weird period from which it sprang.
I was a dissolute college student during the mid-00s, which attaches a certain cosy, familiar glow to cultural artefacts from that time.
This is likely because they remind me of a younger, more carefree time in my life. But also because this was the last era of pure monoculture, a time when a big show, song, or news event could prove truly inescapable.
To put it another way, I may not have liked shows like The Simple Life, The OC, or The Hills, but I probably watched multiple dozens of episodes of each — because they were always on in every house or dorm you went to, at a time when all visual media was consumed from linear TV or DVD box-sets, and we hadn’t yet siloed ourselves in media bubbles of our own creation.
Looking back at the biggest TV offerings from that time, it seems obvious that — aside from a baffling Madonna/whore dichotomy it offered to its female stars — there lay an unexamined obsession with class within the culture, as TV schedules were packed with shows displaying the languid turmoil of rich people with no problems now forced to contrive them every week to a TV deadline.
One tent-pole of this era was a genre I call “I Hate My Rich Children”, best typified by the colossal success of The Osbournes and imitators like Hogan Knows Best and Run’s House, as well as entirely forgotten also-rans like Gene Simmons: Family Jewels.
I have no idea why or how, but I watched hundreds of these episodes without ever deriving any discernible joy from the experience.
In each, a manufactured dilemma or event would be deployed — a new dog, a newspaper interview, a visiting friend — as a pretext to examine the sorts of interpersonal dynamics familiar to all families, only with the dial cranked all the way to 11.
Your own dad, for example, might say something embarrassing when your friends are over, but Ozzy Osbourne will go on national radio to describe the role that Viagra plays in having sex with your mother.
In a sense, The Simple Life merely broadened this project outward — dispatching Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie toward everyday folks by sending them on road trips across Middle America.
They drove pick-up trucks, roped horses, and tended bars, charming and repelling the salt of the Earth they encountered, as well as their viewing audience of millions.
The show mocked their fecklessness and ineptitude when placed in real-life situations, for sure, but it also gave itself plenty of licence to mock poor people too — with gratuitous shots of overweight bystanders and toothless yokels, a parade of grotesques presented for our amusement.
Positioning its young stars — and not the show’s producers, or the watching audience — as the show’s villainous snobs was its most masterful sleight of hand, a projection which allowed it to carry off its more petty exercises in crass exploitation.
We were meant to love and hate Paris and Nicole — indeed to love hating them; to find their guileless hauteur sometimes hilarious, sometimes repulsive, but always compelling.
All of which fed into the cannibalistic rage with which they, and Hilton particularly, were soon reviled.
Looking back at the near-universal loathing she was offered in much of the press and media at the time, it’s bracingly obvious how much of it was couched in — and motivated by — a pure-strength misogyny that’s hard to imagine being weaponised so openly today.
Hilton became a sex symbol, a media titan, and a hate figure, primarily due to her appearances on heavily scripted reality shows and carefully stage-managed public events, all geared toward presenting a heightened version of herself as a character to be adored or deplored by as wide an audience as possible. It worked.
When a sex tape featuring her was released, it was the butt of a million jokes on late night talk shows, and an infamous routine by Sarah Silverman at the MTV movie awards — delivered while Hilton sat miserable in the audience — but little discussion was made of the fact the tape had been released without her consent, nor that she was just 19 when it was made, that she felt coerced into making it by her 31-year-old partner, and did so under the influence of sedatives.
In recent years, many of her detractors — Sarah Silverman herself most prominent among them — have apologised for their conduct at the time.
Hilton has clawed back some of her reputation, and become a steadfast advocate for child welfare — citing her own harrowing experiences of troubled teens facilities in childhood.
Perhaps she can bring that sense of grounded maturity to whatever this new version of The Simple Life will be, hopefully one without the snide rubbernecking to which its predecessor was so attached.
It would be nice to think that a cycle could be broken, and that there is life after having your identity packaged into a sprawling cultural symbol, a figure of hate and ridicule, over whom you often have no control.
Consider that Hilton’s break from that status only really began in 2007, when E! confirmed they were ending The Simple Life for good.
It would be replaced, one week later, by a scrappy new series named Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
