There are no rules, money or iPads on “Utopia,” a Fox reality show that began on Sunday. In this yearlong experiment in building a DIY society, viewers are invited, as the host put it, to “imagine throwing off the shackles of convention and conformity.”

Except, of course, this Utopia conforms to all the conventions of reality television, shackling a little bit of “Big Brother” to “Survivor” and even hints of “Gilligan’s Island.”

Fifteen contestants, carefully chosen by a huge team of casting producers, cover all the bases: There’s a Pentecostal preacher, a tantric-sex-minded yoga instructor, a hot-tempered black ex-convict, a hot-tempered hillbilly handyman, a doomsday prepper (though she prefers the term “survivalist prepper”), a young lawyer, and even a huntress, a young woman called Hex, who carries a bow and arrows and looks a little like Jennifer Lawrence in “The Hunger Games.”

Naturally, they show up on the five-acre compound in what the show calls a “remote location,” which is a hybrid of the farm on “Green Acres” and parts of “Fantasy Island.” They pool their personal belongings, and before they begin to build a new world, they immediately begin to clash. (Even in bathing suits, they are wired for sound.) Shots of tedious chore time are kept to a minimum. Careful editing of tape captured by robotic cameras ensures that there are many shots of the pastor, Jonathan, 44, looking away, upset and sorely tempted, as some of the younger woman skinny-dip, their private parts blurred, near a waterfall.