Is America so in love with Paris Hilton that it wants to meet her mother? NBC thinks so.
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Kathy Hilton, onetime actress and mother of Paris, the pampered star of sex tapes and Fox's hit reality-sitcom The Simple Life, will star in a new reality-competition series called The Good Life -- an obvious play on the title and concept of her daughter's "back-to-basics" show. The new series, to be co-produced by major reality-TV production house Endemol USA and the Hiltons (Kathy and hubby Rick), reverses the premise of The Simple Life, as 10 young women are taught by Kathy to fit into high society while staying at the Hilton Hotels' flagship hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.
The Good Life, likened to George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion by its producers (except perhaps minus the social satire, the irony and the humor), will feature one woman being booted each week by Kathy Hilton for failing to measure up to the week's task. The winning contestant will receive a year's free stay at the Waldorf-Astoria, as well as a car, clothing, jewelry and a one-year job (shades of NBC's The Apprentice).
The initial order for the show is eight episodes, meaning that Kathy Hilton will start the last show with three contestants, one of whom will win. All we can hope is that Kathy does a better job training them in how to act like "ladies" than she did with Paris and her younger sister Nicky.
We also hope that the producers remember the main lesson that Shaw was trying to convey in Pygmalion, which is revealed in the classic speech from Eliza Doolittle after her triumphant "debut": "You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up -- the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on -- the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated." But we have our doubts that the contestants on The Good Life will be treated as anything more than flower girls.