The Simple Life 3 - Interns is apparently a continuation of a series that began in 2003. This particular season finds Hilton heiress Paris and Nicole (daughter of pop star/songwriter Lionel Richie) leaving their Manhattan club scene, limos, and $50,000 shopping sprees behind to travel by Greyhound Bus to the much more modest homes of ordinary Americans in New Jersey, Maryland, and elsewhere. Typically spending one or two nights at each residence, the girls spend their days as "interns" at various jobs: at a day-care center, a funeral home, a local television station, a bakery, etc.

The half-hour shows stick to a tight formula: they annoy their fellow bus passengers with crude sexual conversation and seem amused when the three small dogs they've brought along (as fashion accessories) shit and urinate all over the bus. Each week the host family is shocked by the girls' mountain of luggage (enough for an around-the-world cruise and then some) while the dogs defecate further in the hallway.

The girls invariably arrive late for work, dress inappropriately, and of course foul everything up to the point where the business owners and middle managers are driven to apoplexy. (The show's producers cleverly build episodes around jobs you'd never entrust them with in the real world. Would you want Paris and Nicole to look after your toddler?) At an oil change job they basically steal a police car to go buy some nail polish, and at a funeral parlor spill someone's ashes during an urn transfer, which the girls try to hide by vacuuming up the scattered remains. Interning at an airport, they open passengers' baggage, trying on underwear on the tarmac as horrified passengers watch helplessly from the plane.

Through it all Paris and Nicole look on with a kind of bored amusement, with a vocabulary apparently limited to words with no more than two syllables. They say "That's sexy" and "That's hot" in response to just about everything: "You've just ruined this man's casket!"

"That's sexy."

"That's hot."

In a move possibly designed to sell the girls as less self-involved than they all too clearly are, each week they're scripted to do something nice for their host family. In an early show, for instance, Paris and Nicole learn that one family is mourning the recent death of a beloved little dog so they selflessly decide to buy her a new one. Two, in fact. Great Danes.

If that weren't enough, after the girls are gone the bemused family is further surprised when the dog breeder shows up to collect on the $4,000 bill for Paris and Nicole's "gift."

Although the families seem real enough, the girls' extremely irresponsible behavior, such as passing toddlers off to strangers driving by in the day-care episode, so reek of multi-million-dollar lawsuits and criminal liability that some scenes must be faked or at the very least misleadingly edited. The liability waivers the families and business owners signed would make entertaining reading.

In keeping with the airhead mentality of Paris and Nicole, the show is cut for those with the attention span of a chicken; don't look for any shots lasting more than three seconds here. There's also a grating and extravagant overuse of sound effects, but the unimaginative sound editor uses the same two sounds over-and-over again, in every episode.

Video & Audio

The Simple Life 3 - Interns is presented in full frame format with a picture and sound (2.0 Surround) up to current network standards. Optional English and Spanish subtitles are included. The 16 episodes are spread over two double-sided discs. There are no Extra Features

Parting Thoughts

In the annals of television The Simple Life 3 - Interns isn't quite up to the heights of Harvest of Shame, Elizabeth R, or The Singing Detective, but is certainly remarkable in its own way. Geek shows may have vanished from the midway but they've found a home on the Fox network.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.