Does Netflix’s Silliest Show Really Need to Get Serious?
5 min read
In the first season of Emily in Paris, the show’s plucky American heroine doesn’t speak a lick of French. For every turn of phrase that could move Emily Cooper (played by Lily Collins) up a Duolingo level, the marketing ingenue peppers her cheery English sentences with a whole lot of embarrassing merde. Luckily for Emily, things are finally looking up on the language front. The first half of Season 4, which is now streaming, catches up with her after nearly a year of life in Paris, during which she took some much-needed French classes. These days, Emily approaches language acquisition the way a toddler might: by repeating new words incessantly.
The latest addition to Emily’s fledgling French lexicon is trompe l’oeil, a term first explained to her in one of the new episodes. The phrase, which her friend uses to describe an apple-shaped dessert, refers to an artistic technique that creates the illusion of a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface. Emily in Paris goes on to use trompe l’oeil as a catch-all descriptor for its characters’ deceptive actions. But the phrase is particularly relevant this season, as the show strains to escape its reputation as a flat comfort watch and present itself with more depth. This has meant moving away from some of the transparently ridiculous fare that made the show an early-pandemic hit and toward more serious, unexpected subjects.
But the appeal of Emily in Paris is that the show has always been the precise opposite of a trompe l’oeil. Viewers have known exactly what to expect every season: The anxious, loudly dressed Chicagoan at its center invariably finds herself embroiled in a low-stakes kerfuffle, then shimmies out of it quicker than she can open up TikTok or plop a beret onto her head. Often, Emily has pulled off these feats simply by schooling her French counterparts on the American approach to a given issue. In the first season, for example, she raises objections to nude images of a model in a perfume ad. Not only does Emily end up shifting the direction of the campaign; she also distracts her colleagues from the unfortunate French error she’d made upon arriving at their photo shoot. (“Je suis excitée” does not, in fact, convey work-appropriate enthusiasm.) This low-friction ethos has made Emily in Paris a paragon of guilty-pleasure viewing. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote in 2021, the show “dreams of a world in which following your bliss, regardless of others’ evaluations, pays off every time, while bowing to others’ standards makes only misery.”
This season, Emily in Paris struggles to hold on to this core principle, instead dipping into tricky topics that call for a defter hand. The series revisits #MeToo, picking up on a previous plotline involving Emily’s boss, Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu). When Sylvie was younger, she worked for Louis de Léon (Pierre Deny), a powerful businessman who leads a Louis Vuitton–esque luxury-fashion house. Sylvie is one of the many employees, current or former, whom Louis has sexually harassed, and this season finds her weighing whether to speak with a reporter investigating his misconduct. France has had public reckonings with workplace sexism and sexual assault, but Emily in Paris is not a show that’s well suited to exploring the complexities of #BalanceTonPorc.
Social movements rarely lead to quick, decisive wins that can be celebrated with a bottle of champagne, and the series seems unable to reconcile the gravity of Sylvie’s story with the fluff and spectacle around it. Emily in Paris serves up somber recollections about Sylvie’s former boss alongside an absurd revenge scheme orchestrated by another character: One of Louis’s designers goes behind his back to debut formalwear with ornate phallic designs hanging from the front of the pants. “Men can’t keep their dicks in their pants,” the designer explains in an earlier scene. “Why should we pretend otherwise?” Emily in Paris thrives on such ham-fisted mic drops, but the riotous reveal happens during a disco-night party, and neither the festive mood nor the immensity of the rebellion really sticks.
This season’s tonal dissonance draws attention to the shallowness of the social commentary—and distracts from the self-aware frivolity that first endeared Emily in Paris to audiences. Another arc initially seems intended to critique aspects of American culture beyond the workaholism that Emily personifies. After a pregnant character goes missing, one of her friends casually suggests that she may have left town to have an abortion. When Emily appears surprised by the idea, the friend offers a matter-of-fact response meant to come off as characteristically French: “Yes, it’s not illegal in this country.” Including that line in this season, two years after the fall of Roe v. Wade, is an interesting choice. But right after gesturing toward a weighty subject, Emily in Paris returns to a much more familiar theme: Emily’s frustration with French romantic norms. When Emily finds out that the pregnant character and her girlfriend are temporarily living with the child’s father, she’s exasperated by the arrangement: “Is this a French thing? Is polygamy legal here?”
Emily in Paris is most confident when the toughest questions facing its protagonist involve what time of day to post an Instagram of the Eiffel Tower. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the series neglects to flesh out another woman’s experience of navigating major changes in her body and relationships. The show’s aversion to letting that kind of discomfort breathe, midway into its fourth season, reflects one of the many pitfalls of series designed for binge-streaming. Emily in Paris isn’t equipped to offer clear-eyed analysis of the real world in bite-size releases, and that’s fine. The show can just keep doing what it does best—filtering its home city through the rose-tinted, cat-eye glasses of an expat who never grows out of being a tourist.
