[imagesource: Netflix]

No need to worry just yet, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay.

Flick through a few DStv channels these days and you’re pretty much guaranteed to come across a cooking show, whether it be a professional rattling off some recipes or amateurs trying to bake a cake.

Paris Hilton may have gained a following on YouTube with her ‘Cooking with Paris’ videos, but a Netflix series appears to be a step too far.

Then again, much like the heavily criticised Sexy Beasts, I’m sure it will appear on the list of trending shows soon enough, proving that we, the viewers, just cannot help ourselves.

First up, we see the trailer:

It’s pretty straightforward, and you know what you’re getting.

Which is, according to The Telegraph, a “reheated, strangely joyless affair”, with the “heirhead-in-the-kitchen series [leaving] a nasty smell in the air”:

No more than a few minutes in, as Hilton asks Kim Kardashian, “What’s a tong?” it is readily apparent that Cooking with Paris, a six-part Netflix series, is not meant to teach you how to cook. So what is it for? More pertinently, what is Hilton for?

…ditzy old Paris – she’s 40 now – is so obviously a persona adopted for the camera that it isn’t funny. And if it isn’t a front – if she really doesn’t know what chives look like, or is genuinely surprised that heating food turns it brown – then that’s not really funny either. It’s actually rather sad.

Recently, Hilton said she had been acting when playing an entitled fool on The Simple Life, which is really how she made her big break (aside from that video), so I guess old habits die hard.

The biggest problem with the Netflix show is that she appears disinterested:

In what must at the very least have been a fun series to make, spraying batter everywhere and necking margaritas, Hilton is entirely charmless throughout. If she does love cooking, as she protests, there’s no sign of her having any fun at all doing it. There’s an episode where she spends hours cooking a turkey. The turkey steals every scene.

I enjoy reading these brutal reviews, and it’s certainly more time-efficient than actually watching the show.

Another one? Sure, another one.

Variety calls the show a “disaster” that will see many viewers “tune out before the first episode has ended”:

Paris Hilton may not actually float in a sea of assured entitlement, the way “Paris” does on Netflix. But she is, if nothing else, the one who thinks this act is funny, rather than bone-tired…

Her past treatment (by the media as well as in an adolescence she has described as marked by abuse) was genuinely troubling on a human level. She deserves our kindness.

But the second ask — our continued attention — is a more complicated one. 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.

Let’s finish with The Hollywood Reporter, which says the show feels awkward, “like a teen who’s outgrown their childish antics but cannot quite bring themselves to embrace the inevitability of adulthood”.

I’m sure Hilton doesn’t care – she’s stinking rich and only getting richer.

[sources:telegraph&variety]