From the creators of Sex in the City and Younger comes the latest Netflix original TV show to trend across continents, Emily in Paris. The comedy-drama series is neither funny nor dramatic, so why was it so popular?
Plot
Emily in Paris follows the story of a clueless ditzy American girl Emily who has to go to Paris in place of her boss who found out she was pregnant after acquiring a marketing firm in Paris.
So Emily leaves her boyfriend in Chicago and goes to work in this “romantic” city where she doesn’t even speak the language. She ends up encountering many adventures and challenges there.
Review
My first thought watching Emily in Paris was how lighthearted the show was; given how many political underlinings follow most TV shows these days. Everybody is trying to be woke and socially conscious and it has hindered the public from being able to truly escape real life through the media.
However, this light and happy approach to Emily in Paris also comes off as outdated and aloof. So many nuances of living in 2020 are lost in this series and we are left to manage this very unrealistic story.
Too American
The fact that Emily moves to another country but expects the country to adjust to everything that she is used to is so American.
Emily complains about EVERYTHING. She complains about the people not knowing how to speak English, instead of learning French.
Emily complains about a thousand-year-old city being laid out in circles instead of grids like she is used to in America. She complains about the food, and many French people on social media have attested that her complaints are far from true.
She makes no attempts to adjust and expects the world to immediately revolve around her because she is an American. Emily views the American way as superior and is unwilling to learn new things; standing outside of a more refined culture that she could instead get immersed in.
So cliche
Instead of Emily in Paris to refute the stereotypes about French people, the series basically plays to each and every stereotype in the first three episodes. If there is a cliche about France and French people, best believe Emily in Paris made a joke out of it.
The show promotes the belief that all French men are creeps who flirt inappropriately, sleep with their clients, and cheat on their wives in full public view. It promotes the view that the French are dirty and their facilities are outdated.
Emily does every cliche tourist thing; taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower, wearing a red beret, buying a baguette, dining at a cafe; EVERY SINGLE CLICHE.
Emily in Paris is frustrating because it doesn’t show us anything new. No research was done to make this film. It is based entirely off a bucket list of cliches from someone on the outside looking in. There is no touch of reality here whatsoever.
Hot men everywhere
Emily in Paris is full of very attractive men that just pop up out of nowhere and are immediately attracted to Emily. How? She’s not fascinating and is quite frankly very annoying. And there is no part of the world that has such a concentration of handsome men that you meet them three times a day. UNREALISTIC.
Wardrobe
The styling on Emily in Paris has to be the most cringe-worthy trigger of them all. Emily dresses like an American-in-Paris Barbie doll. She layers on accessories by the truckload.
She sends our eyes darting around the screen, absorbing fragments of her looks. And don’t even get me started on the stupid bucket hats. We never get a sense of the full picture.
And her style does not improve as she continues to live in this fashion hub. No. She keeps putting on bad outfits and learns nothing.
Emily is an a*shole
For a lead character, Emily is very very annoying. She is entitled and rude and cruises about life expecting everything to work out just because. Emily is bad at her job and blissfully unaware of how terrible she is as a person.
Emily takes pictures of strangers without their permission and posts them on her Instagram. She doesn’t speak French and brashly uses a smartphone device, jammed into other faces to translate.
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She becomes friends with French native Camille but doesn’t hesitate to give condescending compliments. Emily ends up sleeping with both Camille’s brother and boyfriend. But it’s all okay because she’s the cute quirky American girl who can do no wrong.
Her boss Sylvie is right to be annoyed by her, as her solution to every single thing is “social media” or “include the masses”. Emily does not allow her American ideology of mass distribution to be finetuned by French subtlety and class. Instead, it’s “bigger, better, louder” all the time and she fancies herself a professional.
Everything falls into her lap in the series, which further buttresses her entitlement and resolve to use American techniques to solve everything.
Social media
Emily’s social media growth is the most unrealistic thing I have ever seen on TV, and Star Wars exists! A so-called marketing professional has 48 followers on Instagram as at the time she gets to Paris.
And from there, she goes up to tens of thousands of followers within a few short months. Unless she bought the followers, there is no way that growth is possible or organic.
Emily posts the most basic pictures with the most boring captions. Like, who is looking for this content?? And I understand that she is a conventionally attractive skinny white woman, but there are millions of these. Emily is not in high demand.
Whitewashed
Paris is one of the most diverse places in Europe, teeming with Black culture and art. Yet, in Emily in Paris, we see only one black person. It’s almost like his addition to the series was as a token, so it would not appear racist.
But to someone who knows about foreign pop culture, every street and every scene in Emily in Paris is whitewashed beyond belief. There are no black or brown models or designers at Paris Fashion Week, no black clients or tourists, an obvious lack of people of colour throughout the series. Sad.
This ties back to the whole show being blissfully unaware of the political landscape and how insane they look omitting people of colour from their show. They are simply clueless.
It is as though someone took a time machine and transported us all back to 2005. This would have been a great ABC Family TV show then, not now.
