Published January 3, 2023, 12:30
The young Emily Cooper is back in the French capital for a third season on Netflix, to be released on December 21st. “Emily in Paris”, the event series born in 2020, is one of the most watched soap operas on the platform in recent days.
But it has also incurred the wrath of the American press. The “New York Times Magazine” violently punishes a new season which, despite everything, continues to enjoy great success.
“I wrote about all the reasons I can’t stop watching this beautifully crafted series, and the most important thing that happened to the Emily in Paris universe, which is that Emily cut her bangs,” Iva joked. Dixit, New York Times reporter,” on Twitter. Because if the author could not help but devour the series she denigrates, she underlines the “absolute emptiness” of the protagonist played by the actress Lily Collins.
Caricature of an American “millennial”…
Netflix he made no secret of wanting to make this original creation a mass of clichés both about the city of Paris and about the profile of a young American worker. The heroine is “sprung awake from a nightmare in which she was forced to face her greatest fear: having to make a decision on her own”, jokes the journalist.
The plot, which is not actually a plot, is built on Emily’s arrival in Paris to work in a luxury marketing agency. Over three seasons, the story chronicles the tribulations of an American in France, between setbacks at work and romantic adventures.
“In 1919, when Edith Wharton wrote that ‘Compared with French women, the average American is still in kindergarten,’ she might well have been talking about Emily, whose stock in commerce is a unique brand of empty infantilism. Nowhere does this it’s more evident than in the way Emily Cooper seems shaped by a baby boomer’s nightmare of what today’s youth are like,” accuses the reporter.
…And a caricature of Paris
And the city of Paris will also be scratched in the series by many over-exploited romantic clichés in literature and cinema. “Paris has long been the environment in which to place a certain category of white American women, cosmopolitan, with a pungent character and upward mobility, who find themselves in the city (often in vain) in search of what their homeland denied them: a renewed sense of self after heartbreak, release (sexual and intellectual), sometimes adventure, sometimes adultery,” the review unfolds.
The reproaches already scattered at the launch of the series in 2020 have obviously not changed overseas. “Constructed literalism”, “flamboyant costumes” and “the characters, a clownish assemblage of outdated stereotypes that managed to offend both Americans and French”, lists Iva Dixit.
confirmed phenomenon
However, the construction of the series and the story now stretched over thirty episodes do not prevent fans from enjoying it. “This series that can be watched with compulsive hatred has become a phenomenon,” notes the “New York Times Magazine.”
Because despite the bad press, “Emily in Paris” is a source of real enthusiasm for the City of Light in the United States, but also among our British neighbors. In the days following the release of season three, searches for “moving to Paris” increased by 1,400% according to British real estate agency GetAgent.
