An evening with Paris

The camera follows her as she drives around Los Angeles in a custom Barbie-pink Bentley convertible. She shops. She goes dancing in nightclubs with her girlfriends,includuing Brooke Mueller,an ex-wife of Charlie Sheen. She visits her mother,Kathy Hilton. She takes her assistant with her to do court-mandated community service,painting over graffiti while wearing Louboutin heels.

But there are no tricky conceits in this narrative: it’s a fish-in-water story.

Hilton is an attractive woman with proven talent for marketing and self-promotion,though as a reality heroine she seems a little passé—a Sony Walkman in an iPod era,a single-process blonde in a triple-process world.

This is,after all,a reality show about a former reality-show star. There was a time,way back in the dark ages before The Hills,Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Jersey Shore,when Hilton was famous for more than being famous.

Along with her onetime friend Nicole Richie,Hilton had a hit series on Fox called The Simple Life,that plucked these two socialites out of Beverly Hills and put them in rural Arkansas to do farm chores. The 2003 premiere drew about 13 million viewers,far more than the 9.6 million who watched the first episode of Glee on Fox or the 8.4 million who watched the premiere of the third season of Jersey Shore,which is MTV’s highest-rated show.

The celebutante niche that Hilton pioneered—nightclubs,designer shoes,pornographic videos and drunken-driving arrests—has been hijacked by more evolved members of the species. Lindsay Lohan is a bigger scofflaw,and Kim Kardashian has a more vigorous sex tape. Even the gossip blogger Perez Hilton has the funnier name.

She hasn’t lost her deadpan affect. “Am I going to be working with,like,convicts and,like,prisoner people?” she asks her assistant,who is driving her to clean up the graffiti in poor neighbourhoods. “Um,I don’t know,maybe,” the assistant replies.

Hilton flashes a small smile. “Awesome.” Many of her peers have moved on. Richie is still in show business and also has two children and a husband. Hilton,30,has a pet Chihuahua and a sometime boyfriend,Cy Waits,a Las Vegas nightclub developer. She has stalkers—one crazed,knife-wielding fan broke into her apartment last year and was held back at gunpoint by Waits.

It’s hard to see how she can recapture the kind of audience she enjoyed in her heyday—even by streaming her premiere live on Facebook. She was a genius at self-invention. But in The World According to Paris,at least,she shows no flair for reinvention. ALESSANDRA STANLEY