By trying to be more “aware” that it’s selling a farce of a fantasy the second time around, Emily in Paris aims to win more jaded hearts (e.g. those who would dare call it “distorted postcards from an American terrorist in Paris”) with its latest season. As part of that fantasy—the kind that goes hand in hand with Emily’s marketing job—there is no trace or mention of post-pandemic Paris at all. That’s not the kind of show this is. Designed instead to allow viewers a retreat into an alternate reality, both in Paris and in life, why would Darren Star bother with anything so icky as the subject of COVID and how it has completely remade Paris, just as every other major city?
But no, allow Emily to live in her alternate realm, so that you might be able to, in turn, live vicariously in that same realm. Unfortunately for white supremacists (sometimes just called Europeans) who enjoyed the show, their bubble has now been burst as Lily Collins was sure to announce, “I really wanted diversity and inclusion in front of and behind the camera to be something that we really put our focus on, in a lot of ways.” And sure, if one is to pause it arbitrarily to see the extras in the background, any given frame of Emily in Paris’ second season will reveal that Collins took only the critique about a lack of diversity to heart, further remarking, “For me as Emily, but also as a producer, after season one, hearing people’s thoughts, concerns, questions, likes, dislikes, just feelings about it, there were certain things that spoke to the time that we’re living in and what’s right, and moral and correct and should be done.” Okay, so, just to reiterate, she’s doing it because it’s “correct” and “moral”—not, say, because it’s an accurate depiction of Paris? Oh these filles blanches and how their placation methods only seem to make things worse. But being that white affluent women won’t acknowledge the taste of a foot in their mouth, Collins seems to think she’s done a particularly stand-up job pour la deuxième saison.
Also thinking herself endlessly “clever” for doing so, Collins was additionally sure to highlight that, in order to better “ingratiate herself” into what life in Paris is really like, she opted to rent an apartment in the city for the summer’s shoot—not even indulging in a hotel. How selfless and novel indeed. But it’s all in service of this one-dimensional character, so how could she not? And yes, in case you were wondering, living in an expensive apartment in Paris for the summer didn’t do much to lend depth to Emily Cooper, still as “daffy” as ever, but not in a Lucy Ricardo sort of way. More in a “I’ll let men’s attitudes toward me dictate how I act and react” sort of way. That said, in addition to Gabriel (Lucas Bravo), Emily’s downstairs neighbor and a chef at the restaurant nearby, we now have Alfie (Lucien Laviscount), the British banker in Emily’s French class. A French class, which, by the way, is filled with non-hideous people that can seem to carry on a decent conversation despite the limited vocabulary available to them. In reality, these types of “mandated” French classes are filled with loons and goons, and definitely not anyone attractive. What’s more, Emily is blessed with taking the class in the convenient area near the Panthéon—as if that would ever happen. As if a required course would ever be in a location anything other than inconvenient and non-touristy. But then, Alfie being attracted to Emily is also a bit difficult to believe. Sure, we’re meant to infer “opposites attract,” but this is purely a case of having nothing in common. Not that she has much in common with Gabriel either. It seems that she’s driven merely by whichever man shows an interest in her.
One of the suggestions for improving the show was to “flesh out” the characters of Mindy (Ashley Park), Emily’s friend and now roommate, and Sylvie, Emily’s boss at Savoir. This proverbial “Miranda Priestly” of the outfit is played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu. And though some might offer her as another example of a French person willingly involved in this project, let’s not forget that she was born in Rome and is probably still trying to spite her French actor father, Philippe (narcissist much on how he chose to name his daughter?), who never wanted her to pursue acting.
As one of the French people on the show selling their own kind down the river, Lucas Bravo once made the apologia, “We have so many ways of thinking, so many different nationalities, so many different neighborhoods. A lifetime wouldn’t be enough to know everything that’s going on in Paris.” Uh, sure. But being that Emily in Paris is clearly the main conduit between average Americans and Paris, wouldn’t it be the more responsible thing to do to parade the city in a less “glittering” light? That includes fewer shots of the Eiffel Tower literally glittering and Emily gushing, “It gets me every time.”
What gets the viewer every episode, in contrast, is how content the show is to sidestep any acknowledgement whatsoever that coronavirus ever happened. Even that other brainchild of Star’s, And Just Like That…, had the decency to at least make some vague mention of the pandemic—though no one is asked to present their vaccination card for entry into a restaurant or bar. Let’s not get crazy with realism, after all.
With the first episode being called, “Voulez-Vous Couchez Avec Moi?,” we are assured immediately that nothing has really changed. Emily in Paris has gone through the motions of changing by becoming more self-aware of how “hated” it is. But if it was truly aware, then maybe the pedestrian next to her would have let Emily get hit by that car in the opening scene of her running through town and flashing back to getting dicked down by Gabriel.
Emily’s state of “distraughtness” is trivialized like everything else in the show when Mindy asks, “Are you okay? You look like you just lost a follower.” But how could Emily—cute, fashionable Emily—ever lose a follower? Not with her winsome air and “can-do” attitude. The things we’re meant to believe get her ahead in life as opposed to, say, her “looks” or being Phil Collins’ daughter (even though one would think that ought to detract from her ability to get ahead).
“Why Does Emily In Paris Make People So Mad?” asks a Variety article that came out in the wake of this season. The real question should be: why doesn’t it make people—especially Parisians—throw rotten quiche at the Netflix headquarters? Likely because the need to cling as desperately as possible to the “pleasurable” and the banal is what makes Emily in Paris “infallible” in viewers’ eyes. Though some who have lived in or are from Paris may need to sear them out after watching.
It’s not something that viewers will immediately realize or even think about too closely (obviously, if one is watching Emily in Paris at all, their entire goal is probably not to think anyway), but this show has no theme song. This doesn’t feel like an accident. For it is so bland, so everything-to-everyone that it cannot even be bothered with a musical theme that would make it more indelible. Even the way Sex and the City’s intro song did.
But where Carrie Bradshaw could lay at least some claim to being a Manhattanite, it feels as though Emily has become more non-French since last we saw her. Unless we’re meant to take her increasingly flamboyant fashion sense as “proof enough” of her “Frenchness.” Or Sylvie insisting of her newfound love triangle that never gets taken all the way, “Oh Emily, you’re getting more French by the day.” She says this to her as they have lunch at the last possible place a French person would dine: next to the Pyramide du Louvre. Fittingly, it was a political journalist for The Nation who once noted of the construction of said pyramid, “What [architect I.M.] Pei really meant [when he said it would help tourists locate the entrance] was that in our unfolding fin de siècle, public institutions need an area… where rich people can assemble for cocktail parties, banquets and kindred functions, to which the word ‘charity’ is attached to satisfy bodies such as the IRS.” Emily definitely falls under that category of assemblage.
Naturellement, what would the most cliché show about Paris be without its first episode of the season being entitled “Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi”? Called as such because Mathieu (Charles Martins) gets them a couchette car for their train ride to St. Tropez. Where else? When Emily here’s the word, she dredges up the “old chestnut,” telling Mathieu “naively,” “It’s a phrase, everyone knows it: voulez vous coucher avec moi?” He replies with predictable dad joke flair, “Well if you insist.”
When he overhears Emily talking to Gabriel on the train, however, he flies into a jealous rage after Emily can’t answer a direct “non” as to whether or not she loves him. The truth is, she was probably waffling as to whether love can mean anything without capital. Thus, we enter the second episode, “Do You Know the Way to St. Tropez?,” which also serves as an inevitable cheeseball caption when she makes her way to the Grand Hotel du Cap-Ferrat, which is actually in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, not two-hour-away St. Tropez, but who cares about minute details, n’est-ce pas?
Emily herself has little consideration for les détails as she lets Camille (Camille Razat) talk her into turning this whole snafu into a girls’ trip. Being that Emily just shagged her boyfriend, that’s the last thing she wants to do, so she calls in Mindy for reenforcement—something she’ll be doing quite frequently throughout the ten-episode “arc.” Another detail Emily seems to gloss over is keeping track of who Pierre Cadault’s (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) arch nemesis is when the fashion diva in question demands to have a photograph taken with Cadault’s new luggage prototype. “Luggage” meaning it has his face on it, not that he actually designed it or anything. “I guess it could be good for brand engagement,” Emily replies to the request vomiticiously as she lets Grégory Elliot Duprée (Jeremy O. Harris, who has officially negated all playwright clout—for Chrissakes, appearing on the new Gossip Girl as himself was one thing, but this?) pose with the suitcase. But it’s certainly no more vomiticious than this season’s tagline: “She’s back for amour and coming in haute.”
In “Bon Anniversaire,” Camille takes Emily to “the hammam” a.k.a. a steam room where Emily proceeds to act like Charlotte in the season three episode of SATC called “Attack of the Five Foot Ten Woman” with her prudishness. Not just because she won’t disrobe herself (prim bitches never do), but because she seems afraid to be classified as a Lesbian in Paris if she makes direct eye contact with anyone’s tits. This, of course, comes out of a humor playbook of yore, something as irrelevant and out of context as the show’s interpretation of Paris. Including Camille gushing, as a Parisian never would, “There are so many cool Moroccan places to visit in this city. I just love it. The restaurants, the tea houses.” French people don’t “just love” anything, but all right.
Ah, but to bulk up the stereotype scene again with regard to reminding us that all French people are morbid and death-obsessed, Luc (Bruno Gouery) takes Emily to lunch at Père Lachaise for her birthday, commenting, “I like to sit by Balzac because no one sits by Balzac.” Obviously, that’s another non-truism. Emily remarks that he must come here often, to which he replies, “Always on my birthday. For me, to think about life is to contemplate death.” Naturally, this is supposed to be “so French” for a man to think about mortality. Laying it on thick, he adds, “Afterlife is nothing. Oblivion. Darkness we cannot imagine.” It comes off more like Grumpy Cat than a Frenchman.
To top off the infuriation factor of this outing, we’re met with Emily obnoxiously shouting, “That came out of nowhere!” when the rain suddenly starts pouring down, as though such a weather phenomenon is an unexpected novelty in Paris instead of, that’s right, a total cliché. Just as the enduring spotlight on French New Wave cinema being so distilled in the public consciousness of what “being French” means. Yet someone as basique as Emily has no idea what Jules et Jim is. So when Luc takes her to Le Champo (a movie theater that would never show something in the same low-brow category as Emily in Paris) in the fourth episode, “Jules and Em” (which should at least be “Jules et Em”), she’s met with instruction about how it’s from “director François Truffaut” (as though this auteur should really need clarification as to his title). Emily pluckily walks around with her Mona Lisa tote bag and notes of the editing style later on, “I thought she was a ghost.”
The ménage à trois scenario is meant to mirror Emily’s situation with Gabriel and Camille, except that Emily would never deign to be part of a triangle. Which is why she’s fortunate to be in not only a Paris 2021 that never experienced COVID, but also to have evaded the 60s and 70s on the Rive Gauche, where sexual attitudes would have sent her running for the suburbs of Chicago. A place she insists has some common ground with Paris in at least one important facet: “I think butter is where Chicago and Paris meet.” The French would beg to differ. Because whatever Chicagoans are using, ce n’est pas du vrai beurre.
As for Emily being more homewrecker than part of a willing three-way, we’re faced with a cheesy, pseudo-sexual scene between her and Gabriel as he makes her a leek and announces, “Leeks have a transformational quality.” The metaphor we’re being hit over the head with here is that Emily is “leek-like.” She’s not as “basic” as you think. And yet, according to Gabriel’s logic, she would need to be molded by anyone “in charge” of her in order to get some semblance of non-blandness. Even Alfie, who self-deprecates about how boring he is by sheer non-virtue of being a banker (in Emily in Paris, the one reality they will acknowledge is post-Brexit financial dealings), is more interesting. Which is why he’s able to mock her for being rather un-fun. But apparently, she looks “hot enough” to see past that. And past her philistine aura when she admits she doesn’t understand Brexit, but Megxit she gets (she didn’t receive Harry’s memo that said term is misogynistic).
But even hearing her make this “joke” is better than hearing Emily try to speak French with a fellow student named Petra (Daria Panchenko), which is almost as torturous as watching her scream about how much she loves to shop before going into La Samaritaine. Where Petra has translated Emily’s use of the word “gratuit” to mean that she wants to shoplift. But if there’s one thing Emily won’t budge on when it comes to morality, it’s fucking over capitalist enterprises. She’ll sleep with her dear friend’s boyfriend, sure, but stealing luxury goods, fuck no.
As for Mindy, her own storyline has taken up a fair amount of the season’s plot as she transcends from Madame Pipi (an odious nickname) at a drag bar to “playing in a band” a.k.a. busking. The entire point of which seems to be ramping up the cringe factor of the show, which wouldn’t be complete without the inexplicable presence of a mime that materializes to steal Mindy’s spotlight in front of the Fontaine Saint-Michel as she sings “All By Myself.” But, as most will tell you, there are no mimes to be found on the streets of Paris. It’s just another myth. Like Elvis lookalikes being pervasive in Vegas.
After Emily’s “brush with danger” while hanging out with Petra, she decides to give Alfie another shot as a French class partner. “I knew you’d be back,” Alfie says to her when she opts to sit next to him instead of the klepto. So it is that we lead into “An Englishman in Paris,” where Alfie gets his time to shine in terms of showing off British clichés like being totally gauche. Which is why Emily gives him shit when she walks into the Le Marais diner, Breakfast in America, teasing, “Well Alfie, I’m very impressed. You found the least Parisian place in all of Paris for us to do our French class assignment.” “Actually, Emily, the least Parisian place happens to be anywhere you are,” he should have replied.
Meant as our requisite cynic to give season two the “cred” that season one did not have, Alfie touts, when Emily asks what he’s doing in Paris if he hates it so much, “I don’t hate it. I just don’t buy into the hype. Paris is built on a fantasy, and I just happen to be able to see right through it.” Of course, these are the words that will seal his death warrant for “falling in love” with Emily.
By episode six, “Boiling Point,” it’s clear that no one is safe from the clutches of this show as Ellen von Unwerth agrees to make an appearance under the guise of doing the photoshoot for Pierre’s French Vogue spread. Luc (Julien Arnold), playing up his gayness much more this season (Collins wants to be more “inclusive,” after all), notes to von Unwerth, “Your book, Fraulein, made me appreciate breasts for the first time,” in that “innocently misogynistic” way that gay men say things.
To further confirm that, in Emily’s Paris (a horrifying term), the pandemic must not have happened, she’s able to mention 2020 without the word “COVID,” instead using it to say, “His Instagram is art, and he was shortlisted in the Pink Lady Food Photo Awards 2020.” Even Mindy’s choice to sing “Falling Slowly” (from Once) by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová with her new bandmates as they busk is emblematic of the show being trapped in some bygone era: 2007. Simple and unburdened by the pains of 2008, Emily in Paris feels more like a relic of this pre-financial crisis epoch, save for Emily’s perpetual need to post content and use the word “content.”
By episode seven, “The Cook, The Thief, Her Ghost and His Lover,” things with Alfie have really ramped up. Emily even has the gall to mock him for being more prosaic than she is (despite her being blithely unaware of that prosaicness). So when she sees the apartment he lives in, complete with air conditioning, she “quips,” “I didn’t know people actually lived in La Défense… I thought it was just business offices, board rooms and—” “Banks,” he interrupts.
In the meantime, Emily’s boss, Madeline (Kate Walsh), has been reinserting itself onto the scene, mentioning the importance of a new high-end, at-home bicycle client called Pelotech (which is obviously supposed to be Peloton—just another SATC a.k.a. And Just Like That… tie-in to this show). Darren Star’s influence arrives again for “Champagne Problems” (being that he wrote it), a title that can only be a nod to Taylor Swift at this point. And, speaking of, it bears noting that Swift basically created the prototype for Emily Cooper with her 2012 video, “Begin Again.” As the storyline that sees whatever grand plan Camille’s mother had whispered to her a few episodes back come into play for “how to win Gabriel again,” Camille ends up benefitting from her father maiming himself with a sword for Champère’s “Pop Your Top” challenge (that was hard to write).
Despite Gabriel being angled back toward Camille by pretty much everyone, he clearly has his own plan to make Alfie too full to fuck (once again proving Cazzie David wrong about that only being a female phenomenon) one night when he and Emily show up at the restaurant. And so, at the end of the dinner, not only does Alfie burp in her face when he tries to lean in for a kiss, he also concludes, “After all that food, I don’t think I’m good for anything else but sleep tonight.”
Sylvie seems to be faring better with her own romance, sparked by a business relationship between Savoir and a younger (than Sylvie) Dutch photographer. But when Antoine (William Abadie) gets in her head about how ridiculous she looks because of the age difference, she decides to defy, Madonna-style, and show up to the restaurant where her boy toy and his friends are… even though she previously said she’d rather just “keep it casual” between them. “What will your son be having for lunch?” the server asks her as she sits down—as though any server would actually phrase a question like that. Nonetheless, she stands up rebelliously to kiss him and say, “My son will be having me.”
Her distraction from work amid this new love affair makes it easy for Madeline to swoop in. Even though it’s unclear why she would be traveling at six months pregnant, when the cut off for pregnant women for most international travel is twenty-eight weeks. But again, how many times must one get it through their thick skull that Emily in Paris, even when it comes to simple facts, does not exist in our reality? As the tensions between Sylvie and Madeline mount, reaching a crescendo in the finale, “French Revolution,” Pierre is the only person who ever truly lashes out at the American sense of entitlement to coming in and dominating a business operation. He declares to Madeline, “You can speak all the badly-accented French you’d like, but I will never understand you and you will never understand me.” And yet, here Emily still is. Trying to “understand” Paris by painting her own “la vie en rose” tones over everything.
But like COVID, which ironically appears nowhere in the show, Emily in Paris is here to stay. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even get a show featuring the little twit in her Golden Years called Et Juste Comme Ça…
