The Simple Life multiplied by 4.5, with no retreat zone, no breaks, and apparently no ability to go out and find a pawnshop. These women may have never heard of a pawnshop. Goods someone else once owned? Completely outside their personal paradigms. It's easy to see how they got suckered into being on this show: they have people who don't read contracts for them...

If you missed the premiere, the premise is fairly simple. Nine spoiled-rotten divas who have no income, motivation, or skills of their own beyond credit slip signing were told they were going on a reality show which celebrated the world of hyperspending. What they got was a series of declined credit cards followed by a notification of their new status: no more money from parents, spouses, and trust funds for the next eight weeks -- minimum. They have to live together, Get Jobs, learn how to take care of themselves, and suffer. Oh, do they ever have to suffer. And the simplest things qualify for suffering potential. Like having dinner. One of them (Gia) admits to not even knowing what a kitchen would look like, while others are happily mistaking dishwashers for stoves. It took them about ten minutes to figure out boxed wine, and that was working as a committee.

You wish I was joking. And if you watch this, by the end of the hour, you'll really wish I was joking. I haven't even started touching on the train-wreck events of last night: eighty-car pileup with not a single brain cell surviving. You may have seen spoiled and clueless on this scale, but not in this kind of mass quantity. They can be tormented by having to cut the contents of five pieces of luggage down to one bag, and were. (This is where pawnshops would come in: most of what they got to keep was still worth a few thousand dollars per piece at full retail. So at least five bucks at the sign of the three balls.) A trip into a middle-class residential neighborhood qualified as ghetto diving. One of them may have gotten pregnant just to have an extra fashion accessory. And the hard parts haven't even started yet -- so far, it's been a night of living together, one dinner, a single group therapy session with their host/life coach, and the notice that more difficult things might be coming.

One of them has already vowed revenge. Her chosen method: spending ten times as much. It's the only thing she knows how to do.

Can they be saved? Changed? Made to at least look for a sale tag once in a while? Taught to turn on a microwave? There are faint glimmers of hope for a few of them, but they're few and far between at this stage. It's Charm School for the ultra-rich and my, do they ever need a few edges sanded off, all on their credit cards. There's even a prize: if they get through this, their financial backers will consider taking them back -- under new terms. (The saddest part of the premiere is the interview cells filmed for the fake show, showing them with the bill-payers: the 'What have I created?' sadness is clear in the eyes of their families -- and to the princesses, completely invisible.)

Watching them struggle with what most people would see as Real Life? Funny. Thinking about how they got to a place where all this turned into a struggle? Sad. Schadenfreude? Very, very high -- but it's also like watching Celebrity Rehab: you hope some of them get better while knowing most of the cast is going to relapse.

Imagine how they'll do on I Love Money 4. They already have the money-loving down pat. And for some, it's all they can love.

Moving, talking, shopping shells.