I turned off my brain and watched "Emily In Paris"
Emily In Paris, Darren Star’s latest fashion-heavy, plot-light TV show, came out last week, and on Saturday I plowed through the entire first season. It’s not a good show, I didn’t like it, but I did enjoy it. I enjoyed it the way I enjoy cotton candy: I don’t crave cotton candy and I rarely seek it out, but when it’s made available to me, I’m grateful for the opportunity to enjoy a big ball of absolute fluff.
The show follows, duh, Emily (Lily Collins), a Chicago resident who unexpectedly lands a marketing executive gig in a Paris agency. So off she goes (seriously, she’s made it to Paris within the first five minutes of the pilot) to be perky and bring an “American point of view” to her French coworkers, who hate her point of view and especially hate that she doesn’t speak French. But there are a lot of pretty clothes, several cute boys, and at least two greasy older French men who look exactly the same. There’s nothing you need to ever actually think about, and that’s exactly the appeal of this kind of show — no brain waves required.
Is Emily someone we’re supposed to like? Maybe? I don’t like her but I don’t dislike her; she’s mostly a walking coat hanger that Patricia Field can hang big coats off of. We’re supposed to buy that a) Emily had only 48 social media followers before coming to Paris, where she touts herself as a social media expert, and b) that her @emilyinparis Instagram would take off overnight with her totally boring and uninspired photos and captions. Of course we don’t buy it, but we also know this is a show written by an old man pretending to know what 30-year-old women are like. Who has the time to be outraged when they’ve put Lily Collins in YET ANOTHER bucket hat?
That said, I wasn’t too impressed with the second episode, which involves an ill-advised storyline where Emily discovers that the French term for “vagina” is “le vagin” and she posts on her Instagram about how “the vagina is NOT masculine!” This somehow goes viral and everyone’s very impressed. I realize that masculin and feminin are integral parts of the French language, but hey, y’all, can we stop making declarations about the supposed masculinity or femininity of genitals? It’s not cute and, frankly, it’s really ignorant and makes Emily and everyone involved in this show look stupid and out of touch.
(Also there’s an episode where Emily accidentally sleeps with a minor and everyone just finds it funny rather than horrifying. Yeesh.)
It takes the show almost two-thirds of the way through the season to pretend to care about any character other than Emily, and even then, it’s just barely. That said, Lucas Bravo (who plays Emily’s hunky neighbour, Gabriel) is a total snack and I will absolutely watch a second season just to look at him some more.
This show is silly and means nothing, and nothing bad or exciting or will ever actually happen to Emily or anyone else on the show. But sometimes it’s nice to eat cotton candy, even if that cotton candy comes with a shocking number of colour-coordinated bucket hats.
Emily In Paris is on Netflix.
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