What on Earth Is This Sitcom?

I venture onto Normie Netflix and don’t know what I’m looking at

It took longer to figure out what the fascinatingly bad Netflix series Emily in Paris actually is than I’m about to admit without introducing the possibility that I had a small stroke during my own participation in the forgotten great Los Angeles typhus plague from before the COVID plague (it’s a long story). So don’t feel bad if you didn’t notice it before I did. But once you see it, it can’t be unseen, just like Brett Favre’s penis, which I have miraculously avoided.

The eponymous heroine, Emily Cooper (often called "Cooper" by her admirers, to show how cool she is), turns in a world of sparkling cliches, like Truman Capote/Catherine Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, whom she is styled to resemble. Except where Holly was charming, Emily can only be described as some kind of impossibly rude ape-woman. 

Which is not a rare choice, at least not in, say, Family Guy or a 1980s sitcom. As an obnoxious neighbor. 

But as a lead character? Well, if you want the same level of monstrous yet physically attractive entitlement, there’s Bojack Horseman, also on Netflix. But that is a satire, so the show's inner karmic logic slowly pounds poor Bojack into the dirt until he learns a thing or two.

Emily is not, for all its consciousness of its own "cleverness," a satire. For the most part. Until it gets good. Unintentionally.

OK, OK, if you look superficially at my bio, this might sound like the narcissistic spite of small differences.

Like Emily, I’m a brunette from Chicago who has moved to Paris without really… planning that. She moved here as the dutiful wunderkind of the sort of advertising agency where I used to work when I was in the Windy City as well. 

But I experienced the joys of pushing unhealthy and overpriced garbage on the public as merely a way to pay the rent. Well, until the guilt overcame me after learning how our client sourced their palm oil. 

Em, on the other hand, finds in online marketing a life-defining calling. She is the adorably vacuous, cleverly monolingual, glittering and Margiela-shod female answer to Mad Men’s Don Draper. At least as overjoyed as he to be busy onstage burning civilization down, one unnecessary petrol-based consumer product with a greenwash and a misspelled slogan at a time.

WHAT?!

I mean, I sound a little grumpy, maybe.

But unless I am still hallucinating from the typhus, didn’t Netflix also once distribute Mad Men? (Fact check: Turns out they’re distributing the AMC project again, only… not necessarily in North America, where its madness took place.) You know, that blistering satire of sexual and economic predation in the 1960s advertising world?

Did they miss the point of that show, or did I? 

As it turns out, Cooper is no less materialistic, shallow, and short-sighted than her fellow advertising star Don Draper, nor is she exactly not a sexual and emotional predator, herself. Her methods of bullshitting are shiny, viral, and new, but her posts on socials bear the same message as Draper’s crude, twentieth-century poster boards of cancer sticks: What people see you consuming is more important than you are.

But it’s OK. For some reason. And not merely because she is female and people are hypocrites, although it’s tempting to jump to that conclusion and sit on it. It’s mostly OK because this show, for all its intellectual pretense—it uses Paris as a shorthand for “being deep” the same way Girls and Lena Dunham used New York as a shorthand for “being worthwhile”-- is nothing more, and nothing less, than an extremely well-produced but otherwise largely traditional, classic 1980s sitcom. 

Classic!

Ainsi, the show seems unaware that anything in the sitcom genre after Charles in Charge or better than Friends was ever written. No Married With Children, no Arrested Development, and certainly no Seinfeld–although to its credit (?), they do make an honest effort to plagiarize the latter: 

In the painfully bad first season, they try to make a cantankerous flower lady into the Soup Nazi. 

But all she really wants, this Floral Fascist, is for the mad, mannerless ape-woman who stumbled into her shop to either learn the local language, stop screaming in her horrible high-pitched yelp, or buy the ugliest flowers the florist offers as her punishment for being a rude sous-merde. The flower lady comes off as so comparatively reasonable that the gag goes nowhere.

At least they gave up on that subplot with reasonable grace. But you wanna know how Emily meets the Sam to her Diane, the off to her on-again, the will-they-or-won’t-they that’s slotted so mechanically into the script? Huh, huh? (Bot-off-cow-erse she has a Sam; what, do you think these geniuses have never heard of Cheers?) 

Can’t wait to share this gem: Her Sam, in this case technically a Gabriel, is a handsome chef. The ape-woman wanders into his restaurant and tries to lecture him about undercooking her steak before she even tries it, then mumbles some crap about being open minded. Meeting cute!

I worked in the restaurant industry for, mm, I don’t want to admit how many years, and this isn’t a typical ugly American trick. Most Americans want to go on living. At best, in real life, such a guest would end up swallowing about a pint of the chef’s cold saliva with dessert—but instead the show rewards her not much later by allowing her to dribble his into her gob all nice and hot.

I should probably be shot for typing that.

Then again, no one involved in this show has been arrested, so anarcho-tyranny it is.

Emily is, I guess, supposed to be our first-person-player viewpiece for exploring the extremely minor cultural differences between her home country and its oldest ally. You want to talk narcissism of small differences? I, a living human, had worse culture shock moving state to state than US to France, although that could be the typhus talking, see above; Emily feels, instead, like she’s been dumped on the moon, and everyone is, my gosh, so unfaiiiiir to her. 

Not that “she” feels anything; there’s almost no suspension of disbelief. They created an uncanny valley out of sheer entitlement.

Then again, the Paris where Emily lives is less real than she is. Some percentage of these scenes must have been filmed onsite, but they needed some crazy athletic camera staff to get an infinite series of shots with nothing in the frame but the vestiges of 19th-Century, City of Lights Paris.

There’s no sign of Paris 2024. The Paris where entire neighborhoods have been renamed things like “Crack Mountain.” The one where those lovely lights have been dimmed or doused due to the price of electricity and the budget crisis (which, surprisingly, has increased crime, they say; I don’t know how, unless they’ve outfitted the criminals with night-vision goggles). The one where bilious steel Mies van der Rohe knockoffs fill the outer rings of the city like a bulls-eye around a suspicious tick bite. The reality where, even if you do bother to learn to speak the language of your hosts, unlike the Kenzo-clad Emily and assholes like her, immigration in the current year is an often-penniless, bureaucratic nightmare, with dead ends and minotaurs you never could have imagined.

I suppose real-life people like Emily kind of do live in their own little world. Perhaps, to an class-privileged young cadre—well the privilege angle has been beaten to death. Whatever your parents’ livelihood, it takes a special kind of void to stare out from the shiny, repeating nightmare of the American ideal of a virtuous, scrappy ad agency and the further remove of Emily’s social-media addiction, and feel chipper about what you see.

Ane yet, it doesn’t take long to get the sinking feeling that the writers think the main character is cute. 

Which is weird as hell, considering the structural similarities to Mad Men, the thematic similarities, and the 180-degree difference in how the two heroes are treated.

Most character development in Emily is easy and positive, with funky music rising to tell you how you feel. When in doubt, out comes all the most shopworn Franco-American boilerplate; they even use the apocryphal joke about the nice American girl who accidentally orders condoms for breakfast. Yeah, my high school French teacher used to tell that story, too. It was supposed to make you cautious of words that look alike but don't mean the same thing. All it did was make you scared of marmalade.

And here it is, being plagiarized by a show that still seems to wish you would take it seriously.

In three seasons, plus the new fourth one the show was recently and inexplicably granted—pfft, who am I kidding?; we lie paralyzed in the grip of the lowest common denominator—not a single episode steered clear of what I what I call "ick hero" territory, or in this case ick heroine:

When the main character starts doing things that are supposed to be innocently awkward and endearing, or bold and spunky, but they actually make you wonder if everyone involved is some kind of horrible criminal to whom self-absorbed ignorance is how you keep the haters and bastards from gettin’ you down.

I’ve never seen Netflix back down from a chance to moralize before. And yet Emily is never punished for her behavior, much less taught anything by… anything. Learning something means you were bad before, I guess?

 By the fourth season, after working in Paris long enough to leave a trail of exes, Cooper’s language skills are still limited to sulking over Duolingo for five minutes a day, but only if she looks good enough for a multitasking selfie. At work, in a scene clearly written by and for some lower primate, Emily has the nerve to snap “English, please” at everyone else in the room, as though they’re being rude—and for some reason, everyone complies. 

The script is needlessly busy, and yet somehow empty; despite the similarities to Mad Men, it feels even more fangless than Thirtysomething, the classic paean to the real artistic geniuses of America: People who are good at selling you poison. 

From Don Draper's cigarettes to the hyper-luxury bullshit Emily's faithful readers will go into debt to buy, these characters have pledged to spend their lives selling you stuff you don't need--but even Don seems to feel more moral compunction about it than Emily does. Her dark nights of the soul are about her work-life balance.

No, I'm not shitting you. Who thinks they need to make up anything anymore?

Fine, I know, it’s pointless to whine: Whatever pseudo-intellectual snarling I might foam up, we all know enough people are going to watch for the pain au chocolat porn alone that we're probably stuck with this crapfest till we blow ourselves to smithereens, fin d'histoire.

But everything feels better once you figure out what you're looking at.

As you might have guessed from the visually perfume commercials that seamlessly blend with the inter-episode credits—a commercial inside a commercial for a commercial—the monstrosity before us is a joyous hymn to friendly-faced manipulation.

And yet there are two bright spots.

The first is minor, but there is one person involved in this project whom I wish well: the actress who plays Mindy, Emily's wing girl and an aspiring pop singer. Mindy seems to have been inserted into the script for two traditional sitcom purposes: One, to advance the plot via her dialogues with the heroine. Two, Mindy's written personality revolves around being a struggling singer, so she provides an excuse to insert a musical number about once an episode. 

This is more like The Young Ones, probably the best sitcom I’ve seen, than an American 80s sitcom, but instead of Mötorhead you get stuff like a cabaret version of "Ooops, I did it Again” by Britney Spears. 

Yes, this is a terrible idea in theory, but the actress pulls it off. She also manages to make this cardboard character nearly charming, which is shocking. I hope she has a great future, but fffffft, look at the state of things.

On the other hand, the character is as badly written as any of the rest, although perhaps "carelessly" would be a better word: Mindy was born to a wealthy family in China to make the show more cosmopolitan, but lived in Indiana for a couple of formative years, so that Em can faintly recognize her humanity. Mindy has supposedly been living in Paris for a while when Emily arrives, and she serves to introduce Emily to this inconceivably alien culture, whose language was used to name half of the Midwest, and show her the ropes. 

Unfortunately, Mindy has never heard of Descartes: When Emily complains that the city is laid out in a circle, "to confuse us," Mindy "excuses" the locals by saying "It's not a logical culture, but it's a beautiful one."

I had no idea the layout of Los Angeles had ever been described as logical.

The second spot was bigger and brighter, but likely unintentional: the heroine suffers a mild and temporary comeuppance, but she handles it with such hilarious weakling bathos, it almost feels like justice.

For most of the new season, I thought she was going to completely get away with being an entitled monolingual jerk.

But following some soap operatics involving a false pregnancy and skiing, Emily--who is now dating her Sam-Gabriel, briefly--flips out on him and declares that what went wrong in their relationship was that he, in his toxic, male, toxicity-maxxing way, simply does not COMMUNICATE.

The lead actor’s eyes focused, and I was suddenly no longer bored; "Oh my god, he's gonna give it to her..."

And I gotta hand it to the French-language writers: the lashing he gave the hypocrite was spicy, and not in the Book-Tok way. He REAMED her for complaining about bloody communication when she’s the one who refuses to even try to speak with him in his own language, in his own country, and expects him to make up all the difference.

She didn't understand a word of it.

Emily’s new, underling, the first sympathetic character since Mindy, steps in to translate. The mentee is Jon Snow-coded, although I forget whether they use the actual word "bastard"; she learned to speak fluent French because SHE HAD TO.

Dude takes a shine to her, and later the ape woman spies them laughing romantically over a drink.

And for one sweet, sweet half-episode, I thought the fourth season really WAS going to turn out like Seinfeld.

In the following scenes, Emily wanders the streets sniffling spitefully in the snow, ´till she chances to stumble upon a redshirt with whose heart she was toying while doing the Sam and Diane dance. For a minute I thought the best episode of Emily in Paris had been ruined, as Redshirt was going to dash into her arms and rescue the day from regret..

But, gosh, turns out Redshirt was already in a serious relationship with a nice girl.

So, alone in the snow, Emily starts crying. Ugly crying. Broken-toy crying.

I haven’t smiled that wide in a while..