‘Cooking with Paris’ is a Bad Food Show, but a Great Portrait of Paris Hilton

Don’t watch Netflix’s new “food” show Cooking With Paris expecting to learn anything about what works in the kitchen. The show is culinary junk food, letting us watch the blind leading the blind around a burner. However Cooking With Paris is still worth watching, if only for its new angle on an early ’00s icon. Star and host Paris Hilton seems to be at a fascinating crossroads in the series. While she still indulges in catchphrases and couture, her thoughts are posed on what comes next in her life. Cooking With Paris may not work as a food show, but it is an utterly fascinating portrait of a celebrity reassessing herself.

Cooking With Paris is a six-episode Netflix series that follows former Simple Life star and ubiquitous party girl Paris Hilton as she attempts to fete her famous friends with her own home-cooking. Hilton hosts everyone from Demi Lovato and her life-long BFF Kim Kardashian to comic Nikki Glaser and famous relatives. Despite her enthusiasm, Hilton struggles in the kitchen, coming up with gloppy blue marshmallows and losing rhinestones from her decorative gloves in her cooks. Hilton understands, though, the game she’s playing. Throughout most of her career, Hilton has presented herself as a beautiful socialite with a closet full of fabulous clothes and a sidekick full of famous folks’ numbers. Her actual skills? Supposedly lacking. Supposedly.  

Hilton’s ability to sell her brand so perfectly has always hinted that she is savvier than her “bimbo” aesthetic suggested. Educated at elite prep schools and consistently able to pivot her career opportunities, Hilton clearly is not as vapid as the character she plays on TV. And Cooking With Paris deals with Hilton’s deficiencies head on. She consistently talks of her love of cooking and her desire to better herself. Why? Well, she’s found a stable relationship and says she wants to have kids. Paris Hilton is ready to settle down and understands that will take some evolution on her part.

While many of Paris Hilton’s early ’00s contemporaries have either successfully reinvented themselves completely or been recently re-examined by the media, Hilton herself has long clung to her iconic early image. She still rattles off catch phrases like, “That’s hot,” and works primarily as a DJ. In fact, the whole conceit of Cooking With Paris hinges on the idea that she’s still that party girl. She needs to wear designer duds in the kitchen and look perfectly styled as she struts through the grocery store. Ironically, I found this to be the least interesting thing about the show. What is captivating? A person striving to learn, evolve, and grow.

Even if Paris Hilton is a disaster in the kitchen, she seems to earnestly want to improve her skills. While much of The Simple Life was built around making her cluelessness the butt of the joke, Cooking With Paris struggles to repeat those jokes in the same way. That’s because the most earnest and compelling part of the show are the moments when Hilton seems to express a desire to change. Sure in a small way this means getting better at cooking. In a larger, more profound way, it’s saying that she wants to perhaps grow up past the Paris Hilton she sold us all. She wants to be a wife, mother, and decent cook. All things that jar against the image she’s carefully cultivated over the decades. Or does it?

Cooking With Paris might think its hook is watching Paris Hilton struggling in the kitchen. In fact, it may be watching Paris Hilton learn that she can grow up and stay true to herself, glitter and all.

Watch Cooking With Paris on Netflix