It was a sight people certainly didn’t expect to see: Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie sitting down with Thomas Adès, one of the greatest living composers, to learn about opera.
Adès is a longtime fan and admirer of them, he tells the camera in “Paris & Nicole: The Encore,” a sequel to “The Simple Life” now streaming on Peacock. The women come to him with a tune, which he echoes at the piano.
They ask him: Can he write their opera? He tells them, with evasive politeness, that he’s not sure he’s the right person for the job. Then they ask him how long it takes to write an opera. One to five years, he says.
They have less than a month.
It’s an enlightening moment, one of many it turns out, in “Paris & Nicole,” a three-episode lark about Hilton and Richie reuniting to write an opera based on their decades of friendship.
This art form, they learn with jaws dropped, isn’t easy. In fact, as the series shows, it’s unbelievably hard.
Still, they are determined. Hilton and Richie, visibly mature and mostly shaking their Y2K-era ditsy personas, set out to compose an entire opera using just one word: sanasa.
As fans of “The Simple Life” may remember, Hilton and Richie often have sung “sanasa, sanasa” at each other. They go into their new series wanting to write what they call “The Sanasopera!,” but, in the spirit of “The Simple Life,” not knowing how.
