Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s ‘Simple Life’ Reunion Is So Much Fun

Anyone who has ever watched even one episode of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s immersive-docuseries-slash-sociopolitical-experiment The Simple Life has probably had one little earworm forever embedded in their brain: the besties’ meditative theme tune “Sa-na-saaa sa-na-saaaaa / Sa-na-sa-sa sa-na-saaaa.”

They’ll slip into it like a mantra, like a secret language shared between two friends or two extraterrestrial beings. The latter was certainly the vibe when they descended upon the small town of Altus, Arkansas, all those years ago, sans cell phones and credit cards but full of a nearly anthropological fascination for the lives of regular people. We, in turn, were fascinated by them, and thus two stars were born.

Following a network change, a falling-out, and a cancellation, the two socialites and erstwhile Sonic drive-thru slushie slingers are back on TV in Paris & Nicole: The Encore, a Peacock reunion special premiering Dec. 12 that doubles as a behind-the-scenes making-of documentary about their most ambitious project yet: composing and putting on an opera. A Sanasa-pera, if you will.

“It’s so random, it’s perfect,” Hilton sums up in the first minutes of the opening episode. “It’s very ‘us’ to dive into a world that we don’t know anything about,” Richie explains candidly. That was, after all, the joy of watching two valley girls cavort around a farm back in the early 2000s. They’ve decided to go a little more highbrow this time around, so most of The Encore is built around various semi-failed attempts to bring legitimacy to this harebrained idea.

They have no songs, aside from the one. They have no music. They have no singers. They have no stage, no costumes, no production budget. (Though, one of them is a Hilton, so let’s be real.) What would be a monumental task to anyone else, even someone involved in this industry, is small potatoes to a couple of girls with a dream and absolutely no qualms or hesitations about whether or not they’ll even be able to pull it off. Despite the chaos that tends to follow in their wake, that blind self-assurance is actually very calming.

The best bits—aside from a string of hilarious rejections from industry professionals who are understandably uninterested in getting involved in such nonsense—occur when Hilton and Richie return to the town that put them on the map… mainly to ask the residents if they’re still mad at them. Their reunion with their former hosts, the Leding family, is not televised, per the family’s request, but they manage to catch up with plenty of former bosses, former friends, and people they made out with once in the bar. These people whose lives they threw into minor chaos two decades ago seem genuinely charmed by their presence, and grateful to see them again.

After that, it’s a rush to the finish with only two episodes of actual opera “prep” to speak of, coupled with boundless imagination. They speak to composers about opera music; they visit a vocal coach to iron out their sa-na-sas; they even attend an opera in a public park wearing a pair of gowns better suited for the Academy Awards. Do they learn anything from this? Maybe. Probably not. They fall back into their Simple Life personas so easily, gazing saucer-eyed at the lives and ambitions of regular people while retaining zero information about what they’ve experienced, aside from whether or not any of it was hot.

But don’t let their bimbo-esque characters or laissez-faire attitudes fool you: These women know exactly what they’re doing, and they know exactly what’s so funny about it.

The special, like the original show, is a masterclass in engineering awkward silence, and Hilton and Richie especially seem to revel in it. They have no problem saying something sudden and outrageous in order to get the perfect reaction from their victims, and the side characters in these episodes seem game to play along. The Encore reminds us all that The Simple Life was more than what it appeared to be on the surface. In the age of anti-intellectualism, it’s important to remember that Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie have always been in on the joke.