Allow me to first outright declare myself a francophile. Between the seven years, I spent learning the language, the Francoise Hardy and Serge Gainsbourg on my Spotify, the hours spent baking pâte à choux, macarons, baguettes, and my several trips to France itself, I am more or less obsessed. So believe me when I say I went into this with an open mind and excitement in my heart…
Sex and the City, writer Darren Star’s most famous series, has aged rather poorly–so naturally, I thought Emily in Paris was his glimmering chance to redeem the bubbly-girl-in-a-big-city genre. Instead of an obsolete newspaper columnist à la Carrie Bradshaw, Emily is a marketing copywriter turned social media influencer (one of the “feminist” ones). Midwestern-raised Emily, played by Lily Collins, paraded the arrondissements in quirky mismatched outfits, promoted beauty products as her feminist praxis, and rendezvoused with fellow skinny 20 somethings, reveling in their own French fantasies.
Since the show really expounded upon French people’s alleged depraved sensuality and promiscuous inclinations, I urgently need to express my dissatisfaction with Emily’s romantic interests. I am not exaggerating when I say all of the white men cast in this show were so unremarkable, I literally could not keep up with who was who. Was that Mathieu or Thomas? Who is Antoine? Wait, I thought that was Antoine? Is that Gabriel? It’s 2020, so they knew they couldn’t get away with an all-white cast, but the diverse men were demoted to the periphery: Julien, a queer-coded black employee at marketing firm Savoir, mostly served as snobbish comedic relief and an Asian/Black streetwear duo remained unnamed throughout, simply known collectively as Grey Space. None of them were allowed even a crumb of the oozing sex appeal of the blinding array of Caucasian men dizzying Emily with their seductiveness. Snooze.
It would be remiss not to mention Emily’s Crazy Rich Asian’s inspired best friend, Mindy. She sputtered poorly crafted jokes about “Chinese mind control” and would rather “dishonor” her family being an au pair than to live in stuffy and rigid China. Mindy, Grey Space, and Julien all suffer from what I call “diversity accessorization”: make these people look good—great even—but besides appearances, their characterization is hollow and self-deprecating. They are an exotic cluster of beautiful stars orbiting the planet that consists of white Emily, her white bosses, her white lovers, and her white dreams. Paris is the most diverse city in Europe. Still, Emily in Paris only goes to show that diversity of ethnicity on screen, but none behind the camera continues to be Hollywood’s biggest problem.
Further, the actual logic of the show is fundamentally broken: the office detests Emily’s ignorant failure to learn French in the first episode but carries on the season speaking perfect English not just to Emily but to each other. Usually, I would let this stuff go; but Emily in Paris made a concerted effort to portray a disillusioned vignette of cosmopolitan life–Parisians are lewd, lazy, snobby, dramatic, and rude. To then compromise this plot device with careless language switches shows, to me, that this portrayal of French people was a flippant insult to make for some entertainment–the show writers offending cultures only to fail to create a remarkable statement of their own. The French don’t actually cherish their language; they’re just snobs. The meta irony of the series is that this choice to insult the French only confirms the same American ignorance the characters initially detest about Emily.
The show’s most redeeming quality is its cheeky nod to the contemporary fashion scene; well-known designers are baffled by today’s irreverent and brash streetwear culture, iconic collections are paid homage to in various scenes and plots in the show. (Fashion critic HauteLeMode has an excellent series dissecting the fashion references the show makes). Emily serves as the viewer’s proxy–just your average girl dropped in this surprisingly male-dominated world of haute couture, uncovering the unbridled bliss of being young and flirty thousands of miles from home. We were granted some nods to feminism—portrayal of female friendship at the very least, a renouncing of the lingual masculinity of the vagina, empowering single motherhood—only to be met with egregiously dated tropes of women. Emily in Paris indulged in female rivalry, women performing queerness to allure men, a repeated story of the intelligent career-focused woman who is completely undone by her lover’s spurn, oh, and a male-headed perfume campaign based on the objectification of naked women—a commercial that Emily called sexist, only encouraging the firm to further profit off the controversy. Again, this show almost too keenly points out its own irony.
Maybe my expectations were too high. Perhaps we still can’t expect shows to diverge from the pitfalls of using diversity as props, materialism repackaged as feminism, and utter worship of white masculinity. I watched episode after episode in a trance-like state of disappointment and disbelief that they missed the mark so badly. Did it redeem itself by the end of its ten-episode arc? It’s a resounding “no” from me. In Emily’s Paris, your romantic interests are strictly white, you can persuade everyone around you to speak English, you can afford sixteen designer bags on a junior copywriter’s salary, and actual queer people are nowhere in sight. Emily’s own closest attempt at character development was an episode in which she intrepidly tells a haughty designer that she’s proud to be a basic bitch. This Netflix series has managed to reduce the complexity of Parisian life–a topic riddled with contemporary themes of immigration, feminine liberation, rich history of political protest–to the realization, “it’s ok to be basic!” This is not an exaggeration. Emily’s ultimate triumph is a “profound” fashion stunt meant to empower basic bitches everywhere! Take my word for it, and if you are craving a dreamy, romantic, Parisian adventure, you are better off watching Pixar’s enchanting film Ratatouille.