Some personal news: I have decided to drop my beef with Emily in Paris (Netflix, from 15 August) which I had always assumed was originally made as soft-edged recuperative videos to help brain injury survivors relearn how to watch TV again, but is actually one of the most anticipated cultural forces on the planet.
The pitch of the show, in case you misread the title, is an American girl called Emily (the titular “Emily”) who goes to live “in Paris” (a city in France – which is in Europe), and there she refuses to ever learn French. She does, however, gasp a lot, and wear extravagantly fashionable outfits, and enter into an extraordinarily unlikely love triangle with a good-looking French man who can’t act and a good-looking Englishman who can’t act. Her friend, a good-looking American who can’t act, is always singing, for some reason. Her boss is mean :-(
Again, I am dropping my beef. When the first series of the show came out I just thought: ‘Well it’s fine, isn’t it. It’s just a bit of pablum. You can’t get mad at pablum, can you?’ Series two dropped, however, and people seemed to actually be taking it seriously. They were making sweeping cultural statements about the French based on what they had learned from watching Phil Collins’s daughter interact with them. They were earnestly trying to anticipate the swerves the story would take. (I’ll give you a clue: she’s going to end up with one of the two men she’s been falling over in front of for the last three series. There’s an outside possibility she ultimately and heartwarmingly decides she’s better on her own, but I wouldn’t put my money on it.) It was all a bit too much for me. Series three came out and the show was binge-watched in my house very much against my will. I kept walking through rooms and overhearing bits of it. Her boss was always mad at her (fire her, then! She’s useless!), the French accents spoken by native French actors were somehow unconvincing, the songs, the set pieces. What an utterly, contemptibly moronic show.
But. I am dropping. My beef with it. The point of Emily in Paris is that it isn’t for me – it’s not even particularly for people who are sitting upright – and once you see through all of that, you can: well, “enjoy” is not the right word, exactly. But you can at least appreciate Emily in Paris for what it is, which is: an unashamedly silly, soapy, Technicolor whirlwind of nonsense. Emily has gone for a jog, see, and she’s seen a lot of handsome French men. She goes home and talks to herself very quickly in the bathroom mirror about all the handsome French men she has seen on her jog. Without her knowing, the handsome French man whose life she has been complicating for no reason for 30 episodes is in the shower, hearing all of this. He reveals his head round the shower curtain, she gasps. He says something like – imagine this in a French accent – “Ouh, so you saw some handsome French men, ah?” There’s some party later that this guy is inexplicably invited to even though he’s her neighbour and, like, a chef. Don’t pay too much attention to the glue sticking this all together. This is basically a story told with dolls by a child whose parents are sobbing in a meeting they are having with a primary school headteacher.
Who cares, though? I’m not going to give you an argument that Emily in Paris is a good show, if you really look at it (it isn’t). I’m not going to tell you that it’s, actually, secretly very clever (although against my will I did notice some very snappy lines of dialogue, almost all of which are given to Ashley Park’s Mindy Chen: “I could sell footpics but … ugh it’s demoralising to do a job you did in high school”).
It’s a show where a series of very quirky and very rich characters watch as Emily takes turns kissing two very blank male characters, and also there are some very beautiful drone shots of Paris in the daytime sun that make you feel as if you’re on holiday, a bit. It’s a make-work programme for beautiful people who can’t act and a show where, 30 episodes in and with 10 more pending, nothing significant has actually happened. Example: there’s a 33-minute season opener where the entire thread is: “Emily has to go to the tennis tournament and kiss a boy or she loses her job” or something. On reflection, I am reigniting my beef with this show. It is beneath every single person who has ever watched it.
