The most recent terrorist attack on Paris comes not in the form of a random knifing or driving a car through a crowded area, or even a bomb going off in the metro. No, instead, it comes as an act of cultural terrorism by way of Darren Star’s latest attempt (at what is unclear), Emily in Paris. Of course, in Emily Cooper’s (Lily Collins) version of Paris, such things as knife attacks or tear gas going off in a crowd of gilets jaunes do not exist. The extent of her “zany” suffering is limited to the smell of shit, seeing a man urinate publicly and the plumbing in her shower going awry. Her version of Paris also seems to conveniently extract the part in history where the French long ago became fully integrated into what “American corporatism” entails. While technology has followed the same timeline in Emily’s world, it seems also to be stuck in the early to mid-00s, at a moment when Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) was wowing her grandparents with all the wonders the internet could perform.
Here, too, Emily takes on that role. Except in this scenario, the “grandparents” are French people, particularly those she works with at a marketing company for luxury brands called Savoir. Tasked with giving them “an American viewpoint” on things, most especially social media practices and engagement, the potential for “comedic hijinks” is intended to be high. It’s also intended to offer us the tincture of The Devil Wears Prada and Sex and the City. But even Carrie Bradshaw has now proven to be less annoying and to possess more depth than whatever this convenient 2-D apparition is designed to show those fifty percent of Americans without passports that all the cliches they’ve been sold about Paris remain true. You, too, can live off croissants every day and not get fat, or turn the corner and run into a Frenchman who will fall madly in love with you.
As an “MTV Studios” (a.k.a. Paramount) production, there is another element of being caught in a past version of what “cool” might have meant in a 90s and 00s era, and the only cliche that the show doesn’t lean into at full force is that, instead of coming from New York (à la Carrie Bradshaw), Emily hails from the slightly less overrated Chicago. In keeping with the total suspension of disbelief required to not lapse into a coronary, we’re given the excuse that because Emily’s more experienced (therefore midlife) and French-speaking boss, Madeline (Kate Walsh, who flickers in and out of the season), suddenly gets pregnant because of all the “going away sex” she’s been having, the job falls on Emily’s shoulders. Emily who speaks no French and does not have the experience for such a role. The other element of disbelief suspension here is that cush jobs willing to set you up in other cities even still exist anymore. To boot, the fact that this show lives even farther than ever outside the realm of the pandemic day-to-day protocol we’ve come to know and accept makes it more of an incongruity.
After promising her boyfriend they’ll do long distance right (you can predict what happens from there), Emily flies away like a bird for what is her first time ever even being in Europe (maybe British Collins felt the same her first time, since Britain has never liked to classify itself as being part of the rest of the continent). She is promptly shown her company-provided apartment by a lecherous French real estate agent whom she must rebuff because she is just that attractive and irresistible (to quote Melania, “Give me a fucking break.”). The apartment is naturally far more luxurious than anything you would get on a budget–though is meant to come across as “trash” to Americans used to ample “modernity”–and happens to be in the fifth arrondissement. It’s all somehow conveniently close enough both to her job and to frequent the Tuileries Garden seemingly every day.
Her new boss, Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), is not nearly as personable or open, playing into the running joke about French people’s stuffiness and self-superiority. But then, could you blame her contempt for the type of creature who rolls up to the office with what she wants to say typed into Google Translate, whereupon she presses play for it to do her talking? Sylvie, thankfully, speaks English, because everyone outside the U.S. is assumed to be able to. This, too, is another endlessly irritating factor: Emily automatically speaks English to any and everyone without the slightest sense of shame regarding her assumption that others should be able to understand her. This, however, happens to be the only element of veracity in the show–for Americans really do act this way not just in France, but any country they happen to dip their toe in for the sake of social media grandstanding.
But this show isn’t about American stereotypes so much as their fetishization of French ones. If there is a cliche you can imagine being used against the French, it is in this show. Even the tagline is a cliche: “Pardon her French.” She doesn’t even speak it, so no need. She flounces through every scenario assured that it will all come up roses in the end, as that is what it means to be part of the International Dumb Bitch Club populated by the likes of A$AP Rocky and tourists who presume drug dealers are worthy of being stabbed eleven times. In fact, one of her endless barrage of shitty social media captions is an image of herself holding up a bouquet of roses with the caption, “#EverythingsComingUpRoses.” Truth be told, one could say that a large portion of the show is devoted to Emily’s “thoughtful curations” of selfies and Boomerangs espousing the most cringe-worthy captions and basic scenarios you could think of, including “butter + chocolate = ‘heart’” paired with a Boomerang of her gnawing on a croissant and “#SmokinHotBodies” paired with an image of French women smoking in workout clothes. There truly is no end to the ways in which Star and his coterie of writers will work to make you shudder in agony as though, yes, you’ve been arbitrarily stabbed by a terrorist on the street.
Even a supposed “meta” acknowledgement of Emily’s basicness is not enough to salvage the effrontery of this show. What’s most egregious of all is that the shots of Paris don’t even manage to make it look as romanticized as it ought to. They are bland stock images with no passion behind them, little better than the unchanging postcards one sees in the creaky, untouched stands outside of increasingly valueless tourist shops. Travel to the most generic version of the city right from the comfort of your equally as cookie cutter living room, carved out of a mold that is just as pre-made and easily digestible for you. And that’s without mentioning the soundtrack, which, while filled with “French ditties,” offers nothing indicative of what’s actually going on in French music. No, instead these are the types of songs you would hear in a “super quirky” Target commercial. Oh, and of course, Edith Piaf, exemplified by an a capella rendition of “La Vie En Rose” sung in the Tuileries.
Emily’s “metamorphosis” is as rapid as any American would expect it to be, minus the part where she becomes at least somewhat proficient in French. As pre-Paris @emilycoop, she has forty-eight followers (clearly, in her field, she would have more than that, but again, let us all pretend to ignore what’s realistic and what’s not). But upon changing her handle to @emilyinparis (the most basic user name “imaginable”), her “influencer” status rises quickly, with 5811 followers by episode two. This is upped significantly when we’re supposed to believe Brigitte Macron retweets Emily’s defiant post on menopause suppositories called Vaga-Jeune because she was “brilliant” enough to be “the first” to take notice of the fact that “vagin” has a masculine article, hence the caption, “Le vagin n’est pas masculin.”
Another quaint effect pulled from Star’s Sex and the City-style playbook? Emily short-circuits the electricity in her building after plugging in her vibrator. One that looks like a back massager from the 90s. As though any woman still even has a wire-reliant device such as this. Again, it speaks to Star’s somewhat schizophrenic conception of what time we’re living in, wanting so clearly to keep it “modern” but also faintly aware that everything about the present lacks anything to be wistful about. Perhaps that was his motive in trying to present such schlock to the world. To remind them of “simpler” times as only Paris can deliver. Meanwhile, the Parisians must suffer the damaging consequences to the further bastardization of their culture, once more reduced to berets, baguettes and bitchy men and women.
At least with Sex and the City, those watching were complicit in the fantasy, aware of its far-fetchedness. This, instead, is Midwestern, visor-wearing, fat, pasty white woman’s porn (a Texan iteration of which appears as part of “American Friends of the Louvre” to wax “poetic” with Emily about the irony of how the sight of a French fry can make one so nostalgic for home). They are not convinced–nor do they want to be–that absolutely none of this has any bearing on reality. French people of corporate slavery do not arrive to work at 10:30 or get to take three hour lunch breaks and it’s all very la-di-da. Oh it’s just harmless froth, there’s nothing wrong with that, is the logic in allowing a show like this to be greenlit. And yet that’s precisely the problem. Making so many allowances up to this point on French cliches has led to this chewed up and spit out saccharine piece of shit trying to dress up as a macaron.
Gossip Girl, fittingly mentioned in this show, and yet another offshoot of Sex and the City’s juggernaut influence, also traded in on the “playground of the rich” tropes of New York. Paris, instead, is a playground for rich Asians, hence the presence of Emily’s token “best friend,” Mindy (Ashley Chen), who fled a life of being the wealthy heiress to a zipper empire in favor of slumming it in Paris as a nanny. At least until she can get her singing career off the ground again (that’s where the a capella version of “La Vie En Rose” comes in). When her own fellow rich Chinese friends come to visit her, scenes of them spraying expensive bottles of champagne in various clubs is enough to make one thankful that such environments are presently closed down.
Possibly sensing that even the most culturally tone deaf person is catching on to the offensive absurdity of the show by episode five, “Ringarde,” where the heights of Emily’s basic bitch quotient get so out of control that the writer, Matt Whitaker, himself needs to address it, we’re thusly given the “snob” character of Thomas (Julien Florencig). He is the mouthpiece that is intended to serve as someone who might question Emily’s “tastes.” He’s also the only character to even remotely reference that anything artistic or writerly ever happened in Paris, name checking Sartre and de Beauvoir, to which Emily musters, “I read Second Sex in college… most of it…” After we choke on our vomit, let us think of something Henry Miller once said about the French: “The courage and the resources of the French are always best displayed by the individual. The nation as a whole may go to pot [in selling out to whoring themselves for American ideas of France, as embodied by “Paris”], the individual never. As long as one Frenchman survives all France will remain visible and recognizable.” But if there are only the Americans to represent him, well, Emily in Paris is what you get. In any case, without Thomas the Pretentious Fuck’s comment on Café de Flore once being a writerly haunt, one might never know Paris was an artist’s bohemia thanks to the preferred emphasis of the entire show on the marketing of luxury brands and “fashion” (of which Patricia Field is incapable of translating from her New York glory days on, what else, Sex and the City–incidentally also serving as the costume designer for The Devil Wears Prada).
Because the French’s only art obsession is fashion, right? They feel it “feeds” them more, as CB would say without feeling even remotely like a total twit. Here it must be said that what could be the most scandalous of all is that any self-respecting French person would agree to get on board with this project, as though selling the noose to hang themselves in the perpetuation of their worst stereotypes. Then again, Collins was “embraced” by hackneyed French endeavors long ago when she appeared in Chanel for the 2007 Bal des débutantes, and also previously flirted heavily with French cliches when she played Fantine in a 2018 BBC miniseries version of Les Misérables.
Alas, maybe now more than ever, it feels important to the French to keep the allure of tourism going if and when Americans are ever allowed back in. They were such reliable cash cows, after all. So easy to please with the mere pointing of a finger at a now closed Notre-Dame or an Eiffel Tower that, at this moment, appears to have a Band-Aidesque strip on it. It doesn’t matter if the fantasy is real, they want it nonetheless, and they want it laid on as thickly as possible. Star is here to deliver, if that’s what you’re into. Cultural terrorism.
