The only thing I am sure of in life is that we are all watching Emily in Paris (Netflix) wrong. All of us. The people taking it seriously. The people watching it snidely. The people watching it for escapist reasons. The people who are watching it as a documentary about France.
The people who are watching it as a documentary about Emilys. The people who aren't watching it at all and are scoffing at this opening paragraph. Phil Collins fans who are watching it for a glimpse of his genetic material (Emily is played by the Collins-spawn, Lily Collins). Babies who don't know it exists but can feel that their parents are agitated.
Insects whose range of vision is so different to mankind’s they couldn’t watch it if they tried. People who glimpse at it on a screen through a house window as they pass by and are later troubled by uneasy dreams.
We’re all doing it wrong.
Emily in Paris: French viewers furious over gamut of Gallic stereotypes
The BBC still rues the day Jeremy Clarkson hit an Irishman
Patrick Freyne: Twink connects with the birds, not just the incontinent cockatiel on her shoulder
Great British Bake Off: wacky Matt Lucas joins wacky Noel Fielding. It’s terrifying
I have no idea what type of show it is even – comedy, drama, game show, “the news”, opera? I’ve heard that no one knows how it was assembled, that the writers each wrote individual pages in isolation without communicating and then mysteriously disappeared.
Darren “Sex and the City” Star’s impenetrable grand plan is so far above us that I suspect it will be only on evolving a new gland, aeons from now, that our ancestors will truly get what he’s at. Then they’ll look at this column on irishtimes.com and they’ll laugh. “Oh Darren,” they’ll say. “You wag.”
All I know is that it’s pretty hard to stop watching Emily in Paris. I have now watched all 10 episodes and before sitting down and watching it again I feel the need to explain what my limited human mind perceived.
American values
Emily in Paris is about an Emily who is in Paris. She is American and she is dispatched to Paris, a makey-up place like Hobbiton or Endor or Naas, to work at a branding firm and inculcate sexy Frenchmen and lady Frenchmen with American values of libertarian can-do-it-ive-ness and union busting (for readers in the future, America was a big country that ended shortly after the show first aired).
Emily cannot speak French but luckily for her, French is really just shouting words slowly in English. Well, it’s this or she’s surrounded by the reality distortion field that comes with being a white American that means that wherever they go everyone is soon shouting in English and exasperation.
I largely don’t understand what’s going on but I’m not sure it matters. I don’t understand the clothes, for example. I’ve not really moved on clotheswise from when God chastised Adam and Eve for hiding their nudity in the Book of Genesis so I’m not sure if Emily’s clothes are being played for laughs or not. Much of them would, if they were Halloween costumes, be called things like sexy bagpiper or golf lady or flamboyant hobo. If I was to guess at her ethnicity based on her clothes, I’d have to say “clown person”. And this tracks with being Phil Collins’ daughter.
Emily is in awe of Paris. It’s unclear why, though she is very aware of French cinema. Ratatouille and Moulin Rouge are mentioned while the filmography of Pepé Le Pew is implied.
She is undisturbed by the fact the Paris she visits is an Escher-like horror where you can see the Eiffel Tower from every window in contravention of the laws of physics. In this Paris, Parisians love nothing more than hanging around at those tourist cafes with the red chairs and smoking while standing in dogs**t.
If Emily was in Dublin, this programme would largely take place in the Leprechaun Museum and Tayto Park and she would be dribbling boxty and shifting Colm Meaney. Frenchies are generally depicted as smelly, sex-obsessed, work-shy and occasionally nude for no reason. One half of Emily's French friends lives in a chateau.
The other makes steak tartare for a living. In the next series I expect to meet a mime, a can-can dancer and a resistance fighter. Thus far, my favourite character is Emily’s weary eye-rolling boss who is not charmed by her incessantly chirpy bulls**t.
Clueless privilege
I am slightly charmed by her incessantly chirpy bulls**t. This may be a form of Stockholm syndrome I've developed after years of watching American TV or it may just be the likability that sometimes comes with clueless privilege.
I mean despite having the cultural knowledge and language skills of a baby, she is somehow very good at her branding job. This is because it’s illegal in America to write television leads who are bad at their jobs. Americans live in a dying culture which is competing itself to death and watching fictional people succeed is their pornography.
Well, apart from their actual pornography which Emily apparently never watches given how shocked she is by affairs, nudity and references to sex. French people on this show regularly say things like, “I find this very sexual” about things which aren’t particularly sexual.
Luckily, being a prudishly upbeat ignoramus is seen as hugely desirable by many sexy French stereotypes over the course of the series: a chef, a philosopher, a perfumier, a guillotine operator, Inspector Clouseau, René from Allo Allo and those guys from the Kerrygold advert.
Over the course of the series she also kisses a wealthy client, has sex with a 17-year-old and lusts after her friend’s rectangular-headed boyfriend and yet is somehow not fired, jailed or ostracised.
Here are some other things that happen which I enjoyed:
A depressed fashion designer breaks successive portions of crème brûlée with a spoon.
A winery owner quizzes Emily on her son’s sexual technique.
Emily, who can’t speak French, becomes upset by the rules of French grammar and sets out to reform them.
With Emily in Paris, Star has transcended genre. It has all the knowing beats of comic satire, but I’m unclear what it’s satirising – clueless Americans? Sexy French people? Reviewers who write things like “transcended genre”? It’s not particularly comic but it’s not really drama either because there’s nothing at stake.
You can tell from the start that nothing bad is going to happen to Emily, ever. This is because nothing bad ever happens to Americans when Americans go abroad or else they have a war about it. If it were a different sort of show I’d think maybe that was the point.
And yet, it’s still unaccountably watchable. I suppose the success of this knowingly frictionless show at a time when we’re all down to our last nerve is explicable but I have no idea what Star is trying to do with it. That said, I’ve six weeks now in which to watch it over and over again. I’ll figure out what’s happening eventually and I’ll report back.
