Checking in with Hilton

Cooking With Paris Netflix

Last year, Paris Hilton appeared in the documentary This Is Paris, in which she argued that she isn’t the person we see on TV. Her somewhat vapid persona, she said, purposefully obscures her real self.

Her new Netflix series, Cooking With Paris, seems to want to deepen her game of image management. The premise resembles that of The Simple Life, the Fox series that launched Hilton as a reality star.

Now, as then, Hilton is placed in an unfamiliar situation and forced to cope. But on The Simple Life, Hilton, with co-star Nicole Richie, travelled America. Here, she leaves her kitchen only to visit food shops. Guests come to her, and together they prepare a meal. Hilton has a secure handle on how she wants to present.

Her default tends to be proud ignorance. What might once have read as her familiar unbotheredness rankles now. In an episode about Hilton’s taco dinner with the rapper Saweetie, Hilton mispronounces the names of Mexican food items past the point of amusement. And upon seeing a pinata shaped like a taco that decorates the dinner scene, she says, “Yo quiero Taco Bell!”

A show about an unskilled home cook trying to make fun meals is not necessarily the ground on which to stage a debate about authenticity and representation in food media. But Hilton has a megaphone, and has only the imagination to use it to say, for instance, that Mexico reminds her of a fast-food restaurant.

Our culture is currently looking back in time to see what does and doesn’t fit today’s mood. Abusive movie producers have been exiled. Interviews with starlets that seemed to some like ribald fun now look to be punching down. And Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, a couple perceived in their 2003 heyday as distasteful for flaunting their passion and their wealth, have, upon reuniting, been celebrated as the love story we need right now.

Hilton asks for the same re-evaluation, but it’s hard to know how to grant it. Her past treatment (by the media as well as in an adolescence she has described as marked by abuse) was troubling and she deserves our kindness.

But the second ask — our continued attention — is more complicated. Based on Cooking With Paris, she hasn’t earned it: There simply aren’t two decades’ worth of interest in the character of a terminally bored person. And who is going to root for a person, or even a persona, who quite literally makes a show of her lack of interest in reaching beyond the protection of wealth?