Emily in Paris

 “Emily tries, but misunderstands…”

[Revised 1/2/23 after finishing watching Season 3.  Season 4 is supposedly on its way down the Autoroute.  Season 3 updates at the bottom.]

More TV show reviews.  This show recently released its second season on Netflix, the prior season being released in October 2020.  The star is Lily Collins, the daughter of Genesis drummer/singer Phil Collins and his second wife Jill Tavelman.  She bears a remarkable resemblance to Alison Brie, an actress I have a major crush on; Annie Edison on “Community” is her prominent role.  She (Brie) was also in “GLOW” (about women’s professional wrestling) and “Mad Men”, which is about angry, insane males in the advertising industry.  I watched the first season when it came out, then conveniently wiped 90% of it from my memory – including who all these people were, except Emily herself – and watched season 2 when it recently came out.  I had to watch season 1 again to reacquaint myself with the prior background.  Also, many of the points the show wants to make comparing Paris to the US are made in the first season. 

The show itself is a bit of a lightweight, and I derive far more benefit from the scenery, especially the rooftop and aerial view, than the interaction of the characters themselves or the plot.  Oh, and refreshing my French by listening when it’s spoken instead of English.  So instead of focusing on the modest story line, I’d rather address other issues.  I don’t care about fashion, about influencers, about social media, or any of the topics which Emily is involved with in the show.  So I don’t care how accurate the show is about any of that.  And if it gives a fairly light and fluffy, cluelessly optimistic and clean view of Paris, well, that’s the intent of the show.  It’s like eating a Whopper or Big Mac and complaining that it isn’t a steak.  I’d call that an unfair criticism. 

Anyhow.  Emily works for a marketing firm in Chicago, Illinois, USA.  Her firm gets a French client, Savoir (“knowledge”) but her boss, Madeline, got pregnant immediately at that time and decided to send Emily instead of going herself.  Emily speaks almost no French, and what little she does she speaks with a grotesquely annoying American accent.  “Bone-jour”, is how she pronounces the French word for “Hello”.  As she’s obviously a lightweight, her French boss, Sylvie – played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, who hasn’t been in any US/UK shows and looks remarkably like Jill Clayburgh - treats her accordingly.  If there’s anything the French love to sprinkle around generously, it’s contempt and arrogance.  [Mindy: “Chinese are rude behind your back, French are rude to your face.”] Season 2 picks up immediately where Season 1 left off, and Madeline herself comes to Paris and proves to be extremely disruptive.  Beaucoup drama.  I don’t recall Madeline ever disclosing which of her three Mama Mia potential fathers is actually the one who put the bun in her oven.  Not that I care. 

Romance.  Emily’s relationship with her American boyfriend back in Chicago (Doug) predictably goes south, giving her free rein to consider local talent, at least 4 different men, albeit on different nights and separate occasions, none of which become serious relationships.  Come on – if Doug wasn’t a jerk and made a decent effort to make the temporary situation work, how else would Emily be free to date locally? 

Office.  Emily’s co-workers at Savoir are Luc, tall, kind of an oddball but very friendly, whereas Julien is the Black Gay Guy.  Initially they treat her like merde, calling her “la plouc” (the Hick).  Apparently Chicago is a tiny village somewhere in Illinois.  Fortunately she wins them over fairly quickly.  Sylvie is a harder nut to crack, essentially being a bitch as a matter of principle, especially since she suspects Emily is going to try to steal Antoine, her lover, from her – and she’s not even his wife, but his mistress.  Later events show that Antoine’s wife is not nearly as sanguine about his affair with Sylvie as she pretends to be, snagging the place alongside him for his trip to St. Bart's that Sylvie considered hers.   Oh, by the way: leaving aside wars, which disproportionately wipe out the male side of the population who actually fight them, roughly 50% of the population is going to be male, and 50% female.  But if certain men not only get a wife but also a mistress, that's going to leave alot of men without female companions - not a sustainable model.  

Camille. French chick, blonde.  Emily describes her as her French BFF.  Her family, which owns a vineyard (how French, Maynard!) is a client of Savoir. Her boyfriend is Gabriel, a cook – he looks like Joel Kinnaman’s younger self.  Gabriel lives literally one floor down from Emily in the same building, which is how they met.  Ross & Rachel: “We were on break!”

Mindy.  Chinese chick, from Shanghai of all places, close friends with Emily.  Apparently Mindy’s family back in China is super rich.  Rich people in a communist dictatorship?  No, not bourgeois, just CCP connected.  Observe the “distinction”.   I had to watch S1 again to figure out who she was.  Mindy bombed on “Chinese Idol” – in front of trillions of Chinese – and moved to Paris to hide out and start something of a new life.  She does not want to live in China, even in Shanghai.  Maybe she should try New York.

Autre Merde.  As noted, I don’t really care to go into the plot or characters.  As an American who lived in Paris, although from age 10 to 21, I wasn’t in Emily’s situation of living there briefly for a job.  However, I do have a similar perspective of Paris, and here’s my observations about the show.

Pas d’Ascenseur.  No elevator?  Most of the buildings in Paris date from the nineteenth century and earlier.  Although all have been upgraded with electricity (though not necessarily A/C, see below) – not all of them have elevators.  Most buildings are the same height, about five stories.  Our building on Blvd. Malesherbes had an elevator, inside the stairwell, plus there was a service elevator in the back I took to my au pair apartment on the sixth floor.  Our guitar teacher, Joel, did not have an elevator – and he lived on the top floor.  That made schlepping amplifiers a bit of a hassle, though I was only carrying a guitar for my lessons.  In these buildings, the elevator goes inside the stairwell, so if the stairwell is a large square box, you've got room for an elevator.  If it's a narrow building with a compact stairwell, then there's no room for an elevator.  Thus the difference between our building and Joel's.

Cleaning after your dog.  Nope, not gonna happen.  Not a good thing about Paris.  

Everyone smokes, even though the health risks are well known and understood – just ignored.  We’re all going to die someday anyway, even non-smokers, right?  Gallic shrug.   Even the women outside the gym are smoking.  As a nonsmoker from day one, I take our own nonsmoking culture for granted, but anyone from France visiting here would probably have a hard time.  Tant pis…

No air conditioning.   Not a big deal 99% of the time.  Paris rarely gets very hot and humid in the summer the way it does in much of the United States, so it’s not cost-effective to install it for the 2-3 days of the entire summer for which it might be useful.  That being the case, the rarity of A/C in Europe is not unreasonable given the circumstances. 

For that matter, it rarely snows, and I never saw any substantial accumulation, let alone a blizzard.  But I’ve seen lots of blizzards in the US in the DC area, and we’re not Michigan, Minnesota, upstate New York, areas which take lots of snow for granted in the winter. 

Bidet.  Yes, you can buy them here in the US, but the next one I see in any home here will be the first.  When we first saw one in Paris, in the temporary housing in January 1979, we were, “what the hell is that? A second toilet?”  I guess without the feminine equipment – I can wash my male equipment in the bath or shower – I’m a bit clueless as to why a bidet is necessary.  The women in my life have been perfectly satisfied and capable of keeping their hoo-ha's clean and proper in the shower or tub.  Bidets were invented before running water was common, let alone ubiquitous.  

Not speaking French.  Let me address this issue.  They give Emily “merde” for coming to Paris without speaking French.  The decision of her boss to send her, instead of going herself, was literally last minute.  She grew up in Chicago.  Was she supposed to instantaneously learn French?  “Language upgrade…uploading….”   Let’s examine this a bit.

Europe is a place with lots of countries very close together with a variety of different languages.  Going from west to east, you’ve got Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, English, Welsh, Dutch, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Greek, Bulgarian, etc.  Just watch an HBO DVD and endure 40 different copyright warnings at the end. 

Moreover, never mind the US, England was a major power for centuries.  It was well worth mainland Europeans’ while to learn to speak English, to deal with the English.   When we visited Holland, we found almost everyone spoke English.  And a Dutch character on the show explains, “because we have no reason to expect any other country to learn to speak Dutch.”  That also makes English a convenient common language for all of Europe, as it’s not cost effective for Europeans to learn literally every different language in Europe.  Pick one language for everyone to learn, and everyone learns it.  Guess what? That language is English, not French (which used to be the common language a few centuries ago), and it’s the language we speak here in the U.S.  How convenient.

In the US, our Northern neighbor, Canada, mostly speaks English, with an accent we can barely distinguish from our own – except for stuff like “aboot” and “eh”.  Only down south do we have a non-English speaking neighbor, Mexico, and a fair amount of people in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and southern California, e.g. San Diego, are going to speak some Spanish.  

But for everyone else in the US, learning a foreign language with no reasonable expectation of working overseas and interacting with non-English speakers on a regular basis, is not worthwhile.  Even if they taught you in school, you wouldn’t have much occasion to get practical experience speaking that language. For my part, I only started learning French when my family moved to Paris permanently and I went to school there, and my Portuguese is only because I had a Brazilian girlfriend and went to Rio de Janeiro five times with her.  Oddly, my Portuguese is about as good as my French, though I’ve never lived in Portugal or Brazil.  Anyhow.  This business of Europeans giving Americans a hard time for not speaking anything other than English is bullshit.  Look at a map.

So, yes, more French are going to speak English than Americans are going to speak French.

That’s about it.  Turn off your mind and enjoy the ride. 

Update on Season 3.  Almost all the main characters are still here, with a few twists

Alfie (Lucien Laviscont).   The actor is English, but I haven't seen him in anything else.  Alfie is a British guy who acts as Emily's love interest while she dallies in the "will she?  won't she" complexity with Gabriel (Lucas Bravo), the chef looking to open his own restaurant.  All of these characters have their idiosyncrasies, but this guy annoys me the most.  First off, his overly stylish perpetual five o'clock shadow.   Then there's the business of having an annoying cockney (lower class) accent while stylishly dressed and having a financial (high class and salary) job and lifestyle.  To cap it off, he only calls Emily by "Cooper", her last name.   I have never seen anyone refer to a woman by their last name only, especially (!!!) if the couple is romantically attached.   That is just so bizarre, it's an affectation.  He's not a villain at all and really just a convenient love interest, but he still annoys me.

Emily herself can be annoying as well.  Part of that is intentional - the writers want to elicit sincere resentment of her among the French characters.   Somehow this girl miraculously solves everyone's problems and gets all the attention.  Plus her eyebrows seem to be larger and thicker than anyone else's, even the male characters.  Bottom line is she's supposed to be a clueless, lightweight American.