Paris Hilton has been a staple in our pop culture lexicon since the early aughts. Ever since she first uttered "that's hot" on The Simple Life, she's been shaping our idea of celebrity. Many over the years have tried to write her off as just another white woman born into wealth who used it to become famous for doing nothing. But those people are wrong. Paris isn't doing nothing. Love it or hate it, she has painstakingly built a very specific brand, and kept it alive for two decades. Now, she's continuing that incredibly niche work on her new Netflix show Cooking with Paris.
The show is meta Paris content, as she's returning to the roots that made her on The Simple Life, a "reality" show that depicted Hilton and Nicole Richie in incredibly scripted scenarios that inserted the heiresses into the lives of regular people. Some of the most famous scenes involved the pair trying and failing to cook and not recognizing everyday objects — like when Paris made an entire breakfast with a clothing iron. It was the kind of TV that would never get made today, as luckily we as a society don't readily glorify wealth as much anymore ... at least not by pressing it up to the glass of poorer people and yelling, "See!" Instead, we let it exist in its own bubble while we drool from a safe viewing distance, like with the more modern, voyeuristic viewing experiences of The Real Housewives or Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
