Where do America's favorite celebutants go when their messy complications become too much even for the Fox Network? They go to E!, of course.
While Fox tends to specialize in the sensational and tawdry, many of its shows have been known to exhibit other qualities, while if you take the sensational and tawdry away from the E! network you are left with a very snowy screen.
Therefore, it is poetic justice indeed that estranged best friends and Simple Life partners Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are taking the fourth season of their "aren't the common people amusing to we socialites, and we to them" reality show to E! after Fox bailed out, likely due to the contradictions inherent in putting together a buddy show where the buddies are no longer speaking to each other.
Last April Paris petulantly puffed, "It's no big secret that Nicole and I are no longer friends. I will not go into the details of what happened. All I will say is that Nicole knows what she did and that's all I am ever going to say about it."
But although Fox renewed the show in July, with Fox Entertainment President Peter Liguori optimistically telling reporters The Simple Life's producers would figure out what direction the show would take "when we sit down, come up with a concept and talk to them," apparently they did not since Fox announced a few weeks ago that it wasn't going to run the show after all.
Then E! announced Monday that it would carry a 10-episode fourth installment, subtitled Till Death Do Us Part, set to bow in spring 2006, which will find the 24 year-old blondes alternately filling in the role as the overseer of a different household each week in order to "put the girls to the matrimonial test." Richie is engaged to DJ deejay Adam Goldstein and Hilton just called off her engagement to Greek shipping heir Paris Latsis. That the two will take turns as head of their assigned families suggests that the grudge has held, though the show, such as it is, will go on.
E! has also snagged the rights to all 36 previous installments of The Simple Life, which it will begin airing in January 2006.
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