You’ve got to give Colin Beavan credit: He’s quite nice to look at, and he is, without a doubt, the most sincere do-gooder who has ever lived an absurdly privileged life on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Also, he is responsible for generating this classic Gawker headline: “No Toilet Paper but Plenty of Ass.”

Why no toilet paper? Because Beavan, in search of a lighter conscience, a blog audience, and a book deal (not necessarily in that order) foreswore toilet paper and all kinds of other miracles of modern convenience—electricity, machine-washed clothes, icy-cold beverages, elevators, taxis—and then told the world about how it made him and his adorable family feel. Why plenty of ass? Because his wife stayed with him anyway.

Can you believe it? Yes, you can. Especially when you learn that she’s a journalist for Business Week who totally gets that this total-immersion environmentalist bullshit is a highly sellable product and that she really loves reality TV—which is what this documentary about their year “off the grid” in Manhattan ends up being.

What redeems a project that could otherwise have been highly annoying is that Beavan doesn’t try to hide the fact that he’s a privileged dilettante. He owns it, with the same unvarnished sincerity he brings to his newfound environmentalism, and this allows the audience to set aside most of its eye-rolling and cheer him on. (But not his wife on her Razor, scooting down the sidewalk to work every day so as not to emit any bad emissions—that shit was just ridiculous.)

Is the moral of the story that people in Manhattan have to pull ridiculous stunts to remind themselves that they live on the same planet as the rest of us? Or that we could all give up our ice makers and install a solar panel on the roof to power the laptop if we would only try? Or merely that at this point, Americans will go to any length to create and consume some new form of reality programming? Watch and learn.