Emily in Paris Won

The series has outlasted far better shows.

Vulture has a tracker called “2024’s Canceled Shows, for Your Final Consideration.” Every time I see it reappear in their recent articles feed, my shoulders do a little slump. When I saw My Lady Jane appear there only a few days after I fervently recommended it to you, they slumped all the way down to my desk, where I quietly lay my head for a few minutes and took some deep sighs. My Lady Jane was one of the most inventive, fun shows of the year and I wish with all my heart it may find another distributor, but its cancellation coming right as season four of Emily in Paris premieres provides a juicy little moment of kismet. Why do the gods favor some and smite others? And is Emily in Paris always destined to be the villainous little engine that could?

First, let’s talk about what Emily in Paris is and, more importantly, why it has the ability to make people crazy. Emily in Paris is about an American girl named Emily, played by Lily Collins, who is unexpectedly transferred to the Paris office of her marketing firm. She doesn’t speak French but she does have a can-do attitude and a deep knowledge of social media marketing (sort of, more on that later). She also has those innate cultural reference points all Americans have about Paris: it’s the city of romance, light, food, and snobbishness. The show follows her adventures as a brashly American fish out of water as she learns how to fit in socially, to dress more tres chic and less tres loud, and to fall in love with the city and its people (all with a heavy dose of sort of).

On paper, the show basically has everything to recommend it. It was created by certified hit-maker Darren Star, known for Sex and the City, Younger, Beverly Hills 90210, and Melrose Place. It stars Lily Collins, who also produced the show. It is about a beautiful girl falling in love with/in Paris. It premiered during the pandemic, when the need for escapism was high. Honey, you’ll never believe what happened next. People hated it! They wrote endless screeds about how much they hated it. They tweeted and Instagrammed and probably TickTocked about how much they hated it. Critics mostly pronounced it tired, unoriginal, and frankly annoying, but most of the ambient hatred came from very online viewers, who made Emily Cooper the main character of the internet for a while. Like clockwork, this hatred would resurface: when it was nominated for an Emmy, when the second and third seasons released, and now with the fourth. All proving, of course, that a lot of people who hated the show… kept watching it. That is, of course, the only language TV execs understand. The show has kept getting renewed, despite no appreciable difference in quality or appreciable decline in the things that so annoyed viewers. In these dark times when My Lady Jane can be beheaded after one season, Emily in Paris has proved itself a survivor. Long may she reign (?).

People who don’t like the show tend to have the same basic complaints: Emily is vulgar, annoying, stereotypically American (in a negative way), her life is fantastically privileged and unbelievable; France is presented as a sort of Epcot version of itself, all twinkly lights on the Eiffel Tower and barges on the Seine, all champagne and croissants and hunky chefs cooking you perfectly done steak. And yet fantasies like Bridgerton, which premiered the same year, have received far less criticism for presenting an airbrushed, glittery, rose-colored version of the world. What is Younger if not a fantasy about the world of book publishing and living in Brooklyn and dating young hunky tattoo artists? My Lady Jane was all fantasy, imagining a world where Lady Jane Grey was not only not beheaded after a nine-day reign, but she also married a hunky man who could turn into a horse. Fantasies are great; why did this one sit so poorly with people? And why do we hate-watch this show so much it consistently tops Netflix’s charts?

I think there’s a couple things going on here. First, I think there’s a disconnect between the way the show is presenting Emily visually and the way she is presented in the script. The show’s visual presentation is telling us that Emily is beautiful, thin, and glamorous. Every camera angle seems to flatter Lily Collins, who has a waifish beauty very reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn. Even when the script is telling us that Emily is doing something that is meant to be seen as a satirical ding against her, like for instance wearing loud, brash clothing that is at odds with the chic black jumpsuits the French women are wearing, the visual language of the show is telling us that Emily is desirable, gorgeous, confident. She may be wearing a loud yellow dress with an odd pattern, but the dress is cut perfectly to her body and flatters her so well it makes everyone else look frumpy. I think this disconnect also helps obscure one of the most important things about the show: it’s not a romantic comedy; it’s a sitcom.

In a sitcom, characters are driven by obsessions that they cannot attain or sublimate. If they attain the object of their obsessions, they cease to be who we know them as and the show is over. Characters can grow in sitcoms, but their driving obsessions stay the same; sitcoms are about characters stuck in self-made loops. In The Office, Michael is obsessed with his need to be loved and respected by everyone. Dwight is obsessed with being Michael’s best friend and number two. In every single episode of the series in which they appear, this dynamic plays out. In the final episode of the series, a married Michael shows up to be Dwight’s best man at his wedding to Angela, the woman Dwight has been obsessed with since the early seasons. Everyone has achieved their desired object, and thus the show has no need to follow them anymore. In the finale of Sex and the City, Carrie gets the thing she has always desired but should never attain: true romance from Big (along with a Parisian fantasia). It is only by literally killing Big in sequel series And Just Like That… that Carrie becomes a character we can follow again. Emily in Paris is a sitcom, but it is often presented as a pure romantic comedy. Most of Emily’s plotlines feature romance, but her driving obsession is to be right. Emily may have crises of confidence throughout the show, but she is unshakeable in her belief that her “American sensibility” is ultimately the right mindset. She doesn’t want to become French; she wants the French to accept her for who she already is, even if that person is sort of awful.

The final reason I think this show has occasioned so much dismissive obsession is Emily’s status as a “difficult woman.” In Emily Nussbaum’s seminal essay from 2013, “Difficult Women: How “Sex and the City” lost its good name,” she posits that Carrie Bradshaw is the unacknowledged first female anti-hero on television. Nussbaum writes,

For a half dozen episodes, Carrie was a happy, curious explorer, out companionably smoking with modellizers. If she’d stayed that way, the show might have been another “Mary Tyler Moore”: a playful, empowering comedy about one woman’s adventures in the big city.

Instead, Carrie fell under the thrall of Mr. Big, the sexy, emotionally withholding forty-three-year-old financier played by Chris Noth. From then on, pleasurable as “Sex and the City” remained, it also felt designed to push back at its audience’s wish for identification, triggering as much anxiety as relief. It switched the romantic comedy’s primal scene, from “Me, too!” to “Am I like her?” A man practically woven out of red flags, Big wasn’t there to rescue Carrie; instead, his “great love” was a slow poisoning. She spun out, becoming anxious, obsessive, and, despite her charm, wildly self-centered—in her own words, “the frightening woman whose fear ate her sanity.”

Emily in Paris doesn’t have the courage to be as sharp as Sex and the City. On an average day it is more aligned with Carrie’s choice to marry Big (and those awful movies that followed) than with the darkness their relationship led her to throughout the show’s run. But Emily is an anti-heroine too, and that’s part of why the show’s visual language clashes so badly against its script. The script tells us that Emily is rude, judgmental, impractical, self-obsessed, and ignorant. But the visual language is saying, “You want to be like this beautiful thin white woman living it up in Paris, don’t you?? Look at her she’s at the ballet! Look at her, she’s in the South of France spraying champagne bottles everywhere.” Even the hallmarks of Emily’s success are so patently ridiculous they must be meant as satire (although I think they’re often taken straight). She posts photos of herself in Paris throughout the first season on her Instagram, somehow gaining thousands of followers and getting retweets from Brigitte Macron, first lady of France. Her “innovative ideas” for marketing French luxury brands on social media are laughably simplistic, but they somehow work beyond her wildest dreams.

I think Starr wants to have his cake etc. here. He has created a show that simultaneously makes fun of and worships this woman, and the result is largely incoherent. Viewers don’t know how to respond to the visual/script clash; it’s impossible to either enjoy this show as a fantasia or to laugh at its cringey out-of-touch caricatures. The best you can do is try not to think too hard about it. I suspect that’s what a lot of people do here; it’s a show that rewards the easily amused (which I genuinely mean as a compliment; to be hard to amuse is no way to live). It’s also, fortunately for its renewal status, a show that rewards the hate-watch.

That part of the show’s appeal is more straightforwardly dark, to me. It’s all well and good to over-analyze the show to the point where I can make sense of my own attraction to it, or to come to better understand why people are misunderstanding some of what its trying (and failing) to do. But to watch it in order to make fun of it, to cringe and then tweet, then cringe and tweet again, is to be trapped in your own obsessive loop. Far better to have given the show a merciful death after season one, then breathed life (and dollars) into worthier attempts.

What’s indisputable is that the show is successful. We have all been sort of beaten down by our own disdain for it. The average critical review now says something similar to The Daily Beast’s tagline, “The new episodes still have the same old romance plots, zany Lily Collins costumes, and the low stakes that make it so watchable. That’s all we really want from it anyway.” Even The Guardian, which originally called it, “an excruciating exorcism of French cliches” has come around (?), saying “there’s no point fighting this nonsense any more” and declaring, “The plot lurches from melodrama to high farce, it’s frequently baffling and the supposedly luxury marketing could have come from a task on The Apprentice. But – whisper it – it’s really fun…” Ah, except for their review of season four, which blessedly retreats to comfortable ground, groaning, “Emily in Paris season four review – as exciting as watching paint dry … if you really hate paint.” But it was the second most watched show in all of television last week, so what are you gonna do? We’re four seasons in; Emily in Paris has won at whatever game you must play to stay on television these days. And she did it without changing one hair on her annoying little head.