It’s excellent timing for the latest series of the fizzy, sherbetty-sweet ‘French’ drama to land just as we’re all up to our eyeballs in adoration of Paris, having spent the past two weeks mooning over horses dancing in front of the Palace of Versailles and enjoying the backdrop of the Olympics opening ceremony, even if the mechanical horse sprinting up the Seine was… unusual.
So if you’re already missing Paris on screen and want to dive straight back, into the pavement cafes, cobbled streets, shuttered windows and exaggerated ooh-la-las, here is American Emily (played by Lily Collins), back for series four, trotting down the street in another succession of brightly coloured, completely wild and deeply un-Parisian outfits.
Sure enough, straight away, we are walloped around the head with all the charming nonsense that Emily in Paris does so well, in its 30-minute episodes – romantic microdramas, work minidramas, handsome chef Gabriel in a very pleasing black turtleneck, cheeky chappy Alfie in a doleful heartbroken state, Camille at the heart of the drama, and her French colleagues being oh-so-French.
It kicks off with a slightly grating recap at the beginning via an Instagram story takedown of Emily’s behaviour during the last episode of series four, hearts pinging all over the screen as it goes viral. But, oh, this drama is as cheesy and fun as ever. I’ve loved it since the beginning, for pure candy-coloured reverie, and I won’t even call it a guilty pleasure — it’s just a pleasure.
When the programme first started back in 2020, everyone the world over was desperate for some escapism and joy – and this was where they found it. Almost inevitably, the French were outraged at the arrogance of Netflix daring to portray Paris and the French in this way. Le Monde described the show’s depiction of Paris as an “amusement park for American tourists”.
They’ve relaxed since then, according to Phillippine Leroy-Beaulieu herself, the fierce,sexy French pantomime villain who plays Sylvie Grateau. She recently told the Times, “they were offended, but I told them, we’re making fun of Americans as much as the French… they didn’t get that. They don’t have a sense of humour, the French…”
That may be true, or it may not. But whether the show is funny or not (I’d go for amusing rather than laugh out loud), there is one distinct departure from form in this latest series. For the first time, there is a dark undercurrent to what is unashamedly, a fairly silly drama.
This is Emily in Paris’s Me Too moment. First, it comes for Grateau – she sashays across the screen, then she is stopped in her tracks, for once unsure of how to behave, when a situation from the past rears up again.
Then Mindy Chen, played by Ashley Parks, accidentally stumbles across a situation she wishes she hadn’t. Emily in Paris is versed in lighthearted romantic and friend dramas, but this is new territory, and I wasn’t sure how such a light-touch show would deal with heavy issues – or indeed how it would then travel back to its natural state.
I shouldn’t have worried. It was fluid, fairly sensitively dealt with, and we are given a good look at the fallout from people brave enough to reveal their trauma – I was impressed that they went there. “Men like this… need to be held accountable for their actions”.
And then, of course, it’s back to the minidramas, back to the couture, back to the endless misunderstandings and culture clashes between the American and the Parisians. The show makes a mild, and amusing mockery of the extremes of both cultures – it’s nice to see the addition of some gravitas, too.
