E-Mail This Article to a Friend Greener pastures Despite its best efforts to be meaningless, The Simple Life inadvertently says a lot about Americans’ perceptions of rural life — and it’s not a pretty picture BY MAX ALEXANDER

THE NEW FOX reality show called The Simple Life defies conventional TV criticism, much in the same way that black holes, by definition, defy visibility. The show’s denominator is so uncommonly low, its premise so deliriously empty, that it ends up being funny in spite of itself — like a fart.

Except on The Simple Life, that pungent odor you’re smelling comes from the cows. The idea, if it can be called that, is to relocate two ditzy blond party girls from Beverly Hills to a family farm in Altus, Arkansas. It’s a given that when these exotic fish flop into the barnyard, wacky goings-on will ensue, critics will moan, and, thanks to recent real-life scandals involving both girls, viewers will tune in.

I did. As a former resident of Hollywood who relocated to a farm in Maine five years ago, I felt perversely obligated to slow down and take a look at this road kill. What I found was a show that, despite its best efforts to be meaningless, inadvertently says a lot about Americans’ perceptions of rural life — especially what we know, or think we know, about where food comes from.

Enforced agrarianism is not a new concept in television (Green Acres) or real life (Pol Pot), but never have its victims inspired less sympathy than the Louis Vuitton–toting protagonists of The Simple Life. It goes without saying that Nicole Richie (the recently convicted, heroin-possessing daughter of singer Lionel), and Paris Hilton (the apparently malnourished hotel heiress/supermodel/amateur porn star whose very existence argues in favor of quintupling the estate tax) are, to put it charitably, empty vessels.

What’s surprising (and distinguishes them from classic dumb blondes like Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield) is their utter lack of charm. "You know what? Fuck off!" is Nicole’s wittiest riposte (the show’s artful bleeping leaves no doubt what’s being said), and both girls wear pants so low that their visible butt cracks are blurred out for prime-time audiences.

Their better-dressed hosts, the Ledings of Altus, seem like a pretty normal rural family. But compared to Paris and Nicole, they’re like farmers in a Soviet mural. They bound out of bed at five, work hard and happily outdoors, eat hearty meals, and share a collective bathroom. There’s no TV-watching pig named Arnold, and they’re clearly not stupid.

But this is, after all, a Fox reality show, where the rarefied heights of dignity can be maintained for only so long. We return to earth in the barnyard, where things get earthy fast.

In the first episode, Paris and Nicole are asked by Grandma to help pluck chickens. They refuse and instead look on in horror. No surprise there; most Americans would recoil at the task, although preparing your own chickens for the table provides, in my experience, a deeply satisfying connection to the food cycle. More revealing is a later scene at the dinner table, where the girls push away their plates of homemade fried chicken in disgust.

Should the point be too subtle, the camera zooms in on a dinner plate, then cuts to a Hitchcockian montage of hanging birds, flying feathers, and falling cleavers. As the Psycho-esque music swells, you half expect Grandma to burst into the dining room wielding a meat saw. What could be more disgusting, the show implies, than eating an animal you just killed?

Better, presumably, to eat battery-raised chickens pumped full of hormones, antibiotics, and substandard feed, then slaughtered and cut into "tenders" 2000 miles away and shipped on a truck for three days to a grocery store, where they sit wrapped in plastic for a week.

It turns out that fear of food is a running theme on The Simple Life. Episode two finds Paris and Nicole in the cow barn, where they have to fill milk bottles. "Is this milk, uh, pasteurized?" asks one (I can’t remember which) as she eyes the bottles warily. Told it is not, she replies sagely: "I would never drink this."

Of course not. She lives in California, where "health" authorities have harassed raw-milk dairy farms practically out of existence, even though the sanitary benefits of pasteurization have been wildly exaggerated. (As Sally Fallon points out in her excellent book Nourishing Traditions, pasteurization destroys healthy natural organisms that actually protect milk from contamination. The process also destroys basic enzymes that help humans digest milk; meanwhile, synthetic vitamin D2 added to pasteurized milk has been linked to heart disease.) Here in Maine, our family drinks nothing but unpasteurized milk from our neighbor’s grass-fed cows, and my kids think grocery-store milk tastes disgusting.

But what’s the point of whining over spilled milk? Lacking the genuine dangers of other reality shows, like poisonous beetles or treacherous waterfalls, the producers of The Simple Life (who almost certainly did not grow up on farms) fall back on the only remotely "gross" thing they can find: real food. In 21st-century America, eating the fresh, natural bounty of your own land is no longer one of life’s basic pleasures. It’s a TV dare.

Of course, TV is partly responsible for our culture’s sad alienation from real food, thanks to the billions of dollars spent on advertising processed snacks and burgers. Rural folks watch TV as well, and from what I see at the local store, they eat as much junk as anybody else these days.

The fact is, television has made America as homogenous as grocery-store milk. Country dwellers like me who watched The Simple Life saw mostly the same commercials you did. One ad asked, "Is your hair pathetic and weak?" Another promised "500 bonus rollover minutes!" Out here in the boonies, we buy shampoo and cell phones too. The simple life, it turns out, isn’t so simple after all. It’s taken me five years to realize that you can have a pretty complicated life in the countryside, or live simply in Hollywood, if that’s what you want. In the real world where no one is trying to sell you shampoo, the simple life is a state of mind, not the state of Arkansas.

At the end of episode two, our heroines make a break for it. It’s midnight on Saturday, and they want some local action. Dressed in bustiers and micro-miniskirts, they sneak out of their bedroom and tear off in a pick-up truck, high beams blazing, as the credits roll. It’s hard to imagine they’ll find anything still moving at that hour in rural Arkansas, but stay tuned: this is TV, where everything is simple.

Max Alexander, who served as executive editor of Variety and as a senior editor of People magazine, now farms in Washington, Maine.