No matter what happens in the world, I find comfort in knowing that The simple life exists. It’s reminiscent of an era of reality television that wasn’t possible today due to problematic treatment and/or life-destroying danger to participants, with shows like Wife swap And Extreme Makeover: Home Edition– the things I stayed up late to watch with my dad when my mom was away. Life was, dare I say, simpler back then: when unsuspecting people were exploited for sport and everyone involved knew it was exploitation. Now we have Netflix’s Lacheys for that, but they act like they’re helping people. It hits differently, you know?

The simple life was the reality of the highest exploitation because the outsiders were not exploited. Then 20-year-old Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie threw themselves into the blue-collar fire and came out looking ridiculous – all in the name of entertainment. For two months they lived with a real family in Arkansas, worked real jobs like dairy farming and fast food sales, and generally wreaked havoc in the heartland by giving regular Joes everywhere permission to laugh at their misery before pulling themselves up by their bootstraps for another hard day’s work. When the rich look stupid, everyone wins.

Paris, now 40, and Nicole met again for the show’s 20th anniversary Paris & Nicole: The Encore. But now they’re adults and mothers, and they’ve had 20 years of labor and exploitation by paparazzi and the tabloids, so making a fool of themselves in a cornfield was out of the question. If that’s what you want, watch Crappie Lakewith former New York housewives Sonja Morgan and Luann de Lesseps – the Parisians and Nicole of their Upper East Side society generation – who are always ready to embarrass themselves for money. Honestly, far too often I think about Luann emerging from that murky lake and triumphantly lifting a catfish over her head.

No, Paris and Nicole already have enough money. This time they returned to Arkansas with their tails between their legs, hoping no one would be angry with them anymore, even though they had good reasons for it. Like the producer who almost got arrested when Nicole hijacked a police car, or the dairy farmer who had to contact the health department because he spilled too much milk, or the bar owners who had to replace their pool table after Nicole doused everything with bleach had it in a fit of drunken rage.

Of the three-part special, the women were only seen in the first one in Arkansas. While the family they lived with all those years ago was willing to meet and reminisce with them, they didn’t want to be filmed. The mayor was very friendly for about five minutes and took a photo with them in front of fake street signs with their names on them. The guy Nicole hooked up with 20 years ago now has a wife! Everything is forgiven, including the incident at the pool table, for which Nicole voluntarily agreed to reimburse the costs. It could have stopped there, but for some reason it didn’t. Instead of making a fool of themselves with physical labor, they decided to make a fool of themselves with… the opera.

One of the motifs of The simple life is a little inside joke about a song that Paris and Nicole sing to each other. “Sanasa” is a word they made up as children and the melody followed from that. “It’s like a mood check,” says Richie.

Apparently, the song captured the hearts of fans so much that the duo decided to make it the centerpiece of their reunion, staging an operatic, theatrical version of the story of their friendship, complete with young actors playing their younger selves, a choir, and many more a handful of TikTok personalities. “The Sanasapera” was a fever dream full of electronic visuals and death-defying feats, like Paris and Nicole descending from the theater ceiling in ball gowns, and a celebration of a hard-earned, heartwarming friendship.

In other words, everyone looks stupid and everyone is having fun, so everyone wins. Alan Cumming is also the narrator of the whole thing. So what do you have to lose?