According to the New York Times, Paris Hilton says she knew what Wal-Mart was, and she was just pretending she didn't to make the show funny.
Um, whatever, but here's the story from the Times:
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With a Rich Girl Here and a Rich Girl There
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
"The Simple Life," the new Fox reality show that follows two pampered celebutantes — Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie — as they trade Beverly Hills for an Arkansas barnyard, is not so simple.
An updated "Green Acres," the show distills the most disturbing elements of existing reality shows — the voyeurism of "The Real World," the gross-out antics of "Fear Factor" and the sexual humiliations of "The Bachelor." Yet by some strange twist of television alchemy "The Simple Life" is not nearly as mean-spirited. The mockery is overt and good-natured, a "Cold Comfort Farm" for the MTV generation.
Ms. Hilton, 22, of the hotel fortune, and Ms. Richie, also 22, daughter of the pop singer Lionel Richie, seem just as ditsy and ignorant as Fox promos and press coverage suggest. But once their cellphones and credit cards are replaced by cowbells and timecards, they come closer to Cher Horowitz, the fictional heroine of "Clueless," than the repellent shopoholic heroines of MTV's latest reality show, "Rich Girls."
Their fish-out-of-water ineptitude serves as a social leveler that gives them their comeuppance and preserves the dignity of their rural hosts, the Ledings of Altus, Ark. (pop. 817), who seem statesmanlike in comparison.
Ms. Richie was charged with heroin possession in California shortly before "The Simple Life," began filming on location and recently pleaded guilty. And just before the show was scheduled to go on the air, a pornographic tape of Ms. Hilton and a former boyfriend began making its way across the Internet.
Those spurts of adverse publicity do not exactly undermine the show's conceit.
In the first episode tonight, Nicole makes even her straitlaced hosts guffaw when she says, "We're nice girls, no matter what you've heard." Sluttish behavior was part of Fox's job description: the producers carefully selected a family with teenage sons at home to help along the course of true lust. The early episodes do not allude to drinking or other hedonistic behavior; on the other hand the girls were sent to rusticate for 30 days, the customary time for rehab.
The tone is studiously tongue-in-cheek. A narrator tells the girls' tale in an Appalachian twang, and hillbilly banjo music plays relentlessly in the background. They play along with the joke, squealing at bugs and mugging like mini-Eva Gabors. At the first dinner in the humble farmhouse, Nicole asks the Ledings if they hang out at Wal-Mart for fun. Paris asks, "What is Wal-Mart?"
Ms. Hilton admitted to a gathering of incredulous television writers last summer that she had actually heard of the chain but thought it would be funny for the show if she acted as if she had not. It is.
The beauty of the casting is that the two young women do not have to strain very hard to fit their assigned roles. Nicole is perkier and better mannered; she smiles a lot and thanks her hosts repeatedly. Paris, platinum blond and alarmingly thin, appears to have almost no affect. She struts about the farm with the blank hauteur of an Eastern European runway model. Her descriptive powers are delightfully limited. As the two struggle to herd cows or pour fresh milk into bottles, she moans in her flat, monied drawl, "I'm going to die."
Viewers are supposed to laugh at the harebrained heiresses in their high-heeled shoes and Von Dutch baseball hats, but not too harshly; these days relatively few Americans of any age or background have much experience hand-plucking chickens or milking cows. The promos suggest that the "Simple Life" reality was molded to conform to a storybook arc: as time passes, the girls end up performing barn chores that might make a grown lawyer faint.
The girls, who share one bathroom with the entire family, do complain a lot. Nicole even tells a proud middle-aged farmer at a barbecue that she finds rural Arkansas boring.
Yet for all their whining the two city girls never really seem that homesick. That could be because they brought with them two cherished mementos of home: a pet chihuahua, Tinkerbell, and a 24-hour camera crew.
THE SIMPLE LIFE
Fox, tonight at 8:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 7:30, Central time
Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray, executive producers. A 20th Century Fox Television production.
WITH: Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.