Emily in Paris is extremely popular. The Netflix series comes from Darren Star, who has already had success with Sex and the City, Younger in Beverly Hills, 90210. Where he was previously unfamiliar with a failed formula, his new show is overloaded with criticism from French viewers. The protagonist Emily is a marketing assistant and has to deal with cheating colleagues, unnaturally clean Parisian streets, colleagues who only stroll into the office after lunch, a whole lot of baguettes and alpine caps. Too cliché, many think.
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The stereotyping of the French capital and the Americanization of the Paris experience are not well received. Emily isn’t very happy in her new hometown and struggles with the status quo, so she’s doing everything she can to change that. It is nice to see that Emily’s criticism is taken seriously, because of the way she delivers it, and she is increasingly popular with her French colleagues. Among other things, her spacious accommodation is ridiculed on Twitter.
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The French entertainment site Critical sense also expresses it. They argue that you ‘must really like science fiction’ to Emily in Paris to watch. In the series, every Parisian is ‘incredibly friendly, all speak fluent English (…) and come to work whenever they want’. “The writers must have hesitated to put a baguette under the arm of every Frenchman or to put on a beret, to make it clear that they are really French.”
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Reviewsite AlloCine is also not happy about it. ‘Embarrassing series, from which one gets a completely wrong image of Paris’, they write. ‘In the show, the French are portrayed as arrogant, dirty, lazy, unkind, bitter … But fortunately there is the young American who comes to tell us how life works. It’s sad and I wonder why French actors contributed to this. ‘
Lead actress Lily Collins is completely in love with the series and tells all about it in the video below.
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