Cooking with Paris

Paris Hilton’s Short-Lived Culinary Experiment: The Rise and Fall of Cooking with Paris

Netflix’s Cooking with Paris (2021) was a surreal, six-episode dive into the world of Paris Hilton—except, instead of nightclubs or red carpets, the heiress and reality TV icon attempted to cook. The series, which premiered in August 2021, leaned into Hilton’s signature blend of chaos and charm, but its run was as fleeting as a viral TikTok trend. latestnetflix.com's read is that After just one season, Netflix pulled the plug, leaving fans to wonder: Was the show a deliberate parody, a genuine passion project, or just another flash-in-the-pan celebrity experiment?

A Recipe for Absurdity

From the outset, Cooking with Paris was less about culinary skill and more about the spectacle of Hilton navigating a kitchen with the same bewildered energy she once brought to The Simple Life. The trailer promised a mix of over-the-top recipes, celebrity cameos, and Hilton’s unfiltered reactions—like her horror at the idea of cracking an egg herself. The show’s premise was simple: Paris attempts to cook (or, more accurately, direct others to cook for her) while hosting famous friends, including Kim Kardashian, Saweetie, and drag queen Gottmik.

The results were predictably messy. In one episode, Kardashian famously critiqued Hilton’s lack of basic cooking knowledge, playfully roasting her for not knowing how to measure ingredients . Another highlight featured the duo getting "messy" while filming, though the exact nature of the chaos remains vague—Netflix’s marketing leaned into the idea of unscripted, chaotic fun . Even the recipes were a joke: one segment taught viewers how to make a "Paris Margarita," a cocktail so simple it barely required Hilton’s involvement .

The show’s tone was self-aware, almost mockumentary-style, with Hilton playing up her ditzy persona for laughs. But was it supposed to be good? The French review aggregator SensCritique gave it a dismal 4.8/10, calling it a "culinary" show in name only . Whether that was the point or not, the low rating suggested audiences weren’t buying it as a serious cooking series.

The Cancellation: A One-Season Wonder

By late 2021, Netflix had quietly shelved Cooking with Paris, confirming its cancellation after just one season . The streaming giant offered no official explanation, but the writing was on the wall: the show’s niche appeal and Hilton’s limited culinary credibility likely made it a tough sell for a second season.

Rumors swirled that Netflix had greenlit the series as a quick, low-stakes project to capitalize on Hilton’s resurgent fame—thanks in part to her 2020 documentary, This Is Paris, which revealed a more vulnerable side of the heiress. But with no clear audience beyond Hilton’s existing fanbase, the show struggled to justify its existence. Unlike other celebrity cooking ventures (think Selena Gomez’s Selena + Chef or Chrissy Teigen’s Chrissy’s Court), Cooking with Paris lacked a hook beyond its star’s larger-than-life personality.

Legacy: A Cult Favorite or a Forgotten Flop?

In the years since its cancellation, Cooking with Paris has faded from the cultural conversation, but it hasn’t disappeared entirely. Clips of Hilton’s kitchen disasters and Kardashian’s teasing still circulate on YouTube, and the show’s self-deprecating humor has earned it a small cult following. For some, it’s a relic of the late-2010s/early-2020s trend of celebrities dabbling in streaming content, where personality often trumped substance.

Was it a failure? By traditional metrics, yes—low ratings, a swift cancellation, and little lasting impact. But if the goal was to deliver a 25-minute dose of Paris Hilton’s signature brand of chaos, it succeeded. The show was never meant to be MasterChef; it was a vanity project, a meme, and a fleeting experiment in celebrity-driven content. And in that sense, it was perfectly on-brand for Hilton.