The New Class Action

Thursday, Sep. 25, 2003 By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

THE SIMPLE LIFE: Socialites Hilton, left, and Richie trade their Prada for pitchforks in this reality version of Green Acres

SAM JONES/FOX

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The show is an equal-opportunity stereotyper, assigning the ladies such Deliverance-subtle tasks as picking up roadkill and buying pigs' feet. (The brand on the jar, inexplicably, is blurred out. When is a pigs'-feet maker ever going to get a product placement again?) There's the genius of The Simple Life: it plays with the tension between rich and poor using such extreme examples that the audience can feel superior to both.

Being both traditionally liberal and traditionally loaded, Hollywood has a strange relationship with class issues. But given that its favorite Presidents have always been dead and printed on green paper, these shows hew to a straight-down-the-middle politics: inheritance is bad if you're lazy, but not if you still work hard; poverty is bad, but no whiners allowed. Luis' and Tracy's working-class entrepreneurs are as disdainful of freeloaders as any Rotarian. Still, rich people remain Hollywood's preferred satire targets — we can laugh at them without guilt, seeing as how they can laugh all the way to the bank. Fox's midseason Cracking Up is a darkly comic sitcom about a rich family — from executive producer Mike White, who in 2001 gave us Pasadena, a darkly comic soap about a crazy rich family. And the fall's best sitcom is Fox's Arrested Development (Sundays, 9:30 p.m. E.T., starting Nov. 2), about the Bluths, a family of eccentric loafers whose patriarch, George (Jeffrey Tambor), is jailed by the SEC and whose one hardworking, white-sheep son (Jason Bateman) tries to keep the family and the business together.

"The politics of the times have set the stage for these shows and themes," says Development creator Mitch Hurwitz, who adds that the scandal at the family-owned Adelphia cable company inspired the story. "We've seen the rich getting richer by cheating and the rest of us getting $600 checks in the mail." But ironically, what works so well about Development is that it's a family story, not a political one. When the SEC comes for George, his son Gob, a self-important aspiring magician, hides him inside one of his props. "I don't have time for your magic tricks!" George cries. Gob sighs — and you can read a lifelong strained relationship into that sigh--"Illusions, Dad. You don't have time for my illusions." The rich may be getting richer, but if their foibles keep yielding comedy this — well, rich — at least something about the system still works.