Netflix’s silliest present is the epitome of guilty-pleasure viewing. It ought to most likely keep that approach.
Within the first season of Emily in Paris, the present’s plucky American heroine doesn’t communicate a lick of French. For each flip of phrase that might transfer Emily Cooper (performed by Lily Collins) up a Duolingo stage, the advertising ingenue peppers her cheery English sentences with an entire lot of embarrassing merde. Fortunately for Emily, issues are lastly wanting up on the language entrance. The primary half of Season 4, which is now streaming, catches up along with her after almost a yr of life in Paris, throughout which she took some much-needed French lessons. Lately, Emily approaches language acquisition the best way a toddler would possibly: by repeating new phrases incessantly.
The newest addition to Emily’s fledgling French lexicon is trompe l’oeil, a time period first defined to her in one of many new episodes. The phrase, which her pal makes use of to explain an apple-shaped dessert, refers to an inventive method that creates the phantasm of a three-dimensional picture on a two-dimensional floor. Emily in Paris goes on to make use of trompe l’oeil as a catch-all descriptor for its characters’ misleading actions. However the phrase is especially related this season, because the present strains to flee its popularity as a flat consolation watch and current itself with extra depth. This has meant shifting away from a few of the transparently ridiculous fare that made the present an early-pandemic hit and towards extra critical, surprising topics.
However the attraction of Emily in Paris is that the present has at all times been the exact reverse of a trompe l’oeil. Viewers have identified precisely what to anticipate each season: The anxious, loudly dressed Chicagoan at its heart invariably finds herself embroiled in a low-stakes kerfuffle, then shimmies out of it faster than she will open up TikTok or plop a beret onto her head. Typically, Emily has pulled off these feats just by education her French counterparts on the American strategy to a given problem. Within the first season, for instance, she raises objections to nude photos of a mannequin in a fragrance advert. Not solely does Emily find yourself shifting the route of the marketing campaign; she additionally distracts her colleagues from the unlucky French error she’d made upon arriving at their photograph shoot. (“Je suis excitée” doesn’t, in reality, 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 present “desires of a world by which following your bliss, no matter others’ evaluations, pays off each time, whereas bowing to others’ requirements makes solely distress.”
This season, Emily in Paris struggles to carry on to this core precept, as an alternative dipping into difficult matters that decision for a defter hand. The collection revisits #MeToo, choosing up on a earlier plotline involving Emily’s boss, Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu). When Sylvie was youthful, she labored for Louis de Léon (Pierre Deny), a robust businessman who leads a Louis Vuitton–esque luxury-fashion home. Sylvie is among the many workers, present or former, whom Louis has sexually harassed, and this season finds her weighing whether or not to talk with a reporter investigating his misconduct. France has had public reckonings with office sexism and sexual assault, however Emily in Paris will not be a present that’s nicely suited to exploring the complexities of #BalanceTonPorc.
Social actions not often result in fast, decisive wins that may be celebrated with a bottle of champagne, and the collection appears unable to reconcile the gravity of Sylvie’s story with the fluff and spectacle round it. Emily in Paris serves up somber recollections about Sylvie’s former boss alongside an absurd revenge scheme orchestrated by one other character: Considered one of Louis’s designers goes behind his again to debut formalwear with ornate phallic designs hanging from the entrance of the pants. “Males can’t hold their dicks of their pants,” the designer explains in an earlier scene. “Why ought to we fake in any other case?” Emily in Paris thrives on such ham-fisted mic drops, however the riotous reveal occurs throughout a disco-night get together, and neither the festive temper nor the immensity of the riot actually sticks.
This season’s tonal dissonance attracts consideration to the vanity of the social commentary—and distracts from the self-aware frivolity that first endeared Emily in Paris to audiences. One other arc initially appears meant to critique points of American tradition past the workaholism that Emily personifies. After a pregnant character goes lacking, certainly one of her associates casually means that she could have left city to have an abortion. When Emily seems shocked by the thought, the pal provides a matter-of-fact response meant to return off as characteristically French: “Sure, it’s not unlawful on this nation.” Together with that line on this season, two years after the fall of Roe v. Wade, is an fascinating selection. However proper after gesturing towards a weighty topic, Emily in Paris returns to a way more acquainted theme: Emily’s frustration with French romantic norms. When Emily finds out that the pregnant character and her girlfriend are quickly residing with the kid’s father, she’s exasperated by the association: “Is that this a French factor? Is polygamy authorized right here?”
Emily in Paris is most assured when the hardest questions dealing with its protagonist contain what time of day to submit an Instagram of the Eiffel Tower. So it shouldn’t come as a shock that the collection neglects to flesh out one other lady’s expertise of navigating main modifications in her physique and relationships. The present’s aversion to letting that sort of discomfort breathe, halfway into its fourth season, displays one of many many pitfalls of collection designed for binge-streaming. Emily in Paris isn’t outfitted to supply clear-eyed evaluation of the actual world in bite-size releases, and that’s high quality. The present can simply hold doing what it does greatest—filtering its residence metropolis by way of the rose-tinted, cat-eye glasses of an expat who by no means grows out of being a vacationer.
