Since the release of its first season in October 2020, the Netflix series Emily in Paris has garnered a lot of attention. It tells the story of Emily Cooper, a young American woman who is about to be sent to Paris to bring “an American point of view,” an American point of view, to a prestigious French marketing firm for luxury brands, just from the multinational company she works for bring in for. . The series is executive produced by Sex and the City and Beverly Hills 90210 creator Darren Star and was nominated for Best Comedy Series at both last year’s Emmys and Golden Globes. Netflix, which is known for dropping many of its series after the second season – including those that have very devoted fans, such as The OA or Sense8 – has renewed Emily in Paris for a fourth season.
Based on these premises, it would be logical to think that Emily in Paris is a very popular series. But as with the release of seasons one and two, the third – available on Netflix December 21st – has been greeted by many comments on how predictable and empty the plot and the intolerable protagonist are, and in general how improbable it is Representation of his life in Paris, between huge and luxurious apartments, flashy and always new clothes and sparkling clean streets.
One expression that has been extensively associated with Emily in Paris is “hate-watching,” or following a show, series, or movie just to poke fun at its absurdities and poke fun at its poor quality , alone or in company, live or on social media and in group chats.
Me to myself before I start watching Emily in Paris season 3 knowing that this series doesn’t make any sense to my brain but I just can’t give it up after 2 seasonsđź‘Ť pic.twitter.com/vjSjXhzNjR
— Megha (@kyayaarmegha) December 21, 2022
A meme about watching Emily in Paris while I hate it: «What do I tell myself when I start watching Emily in Paris season 3 even though I know I don’t get the meaning but don’t give up after that can have two seasons: ‘Leave me alone, you illiterate sociopath’».
While these may be cheesy reality shows and cheesy TV series that many eagerly watch knowing it is what is often labeled “junk TV,” hate-watching is generally devoted to programs that have been created with large budgets and involve directors, writers, or celebrity actors, but which have objective limitations that make them borderline embarrassing to many, although they exert an appeal that one cannot or will not resist.
Among the series of the past that had a portion of viewers who watched them while hating them, according to the comments that accompanied their broadcast, there are, for example, Glee (TV series that aired from 2009 to 2015 and for known for their dramatic and complicated plots and slightly embarrassing covers), the sitcom The Big Bang Theory and Girls, the series that made Lena Dunham famous. The best-known series object of hate-watching today is probably Emily in Paris.
“Every bad review I read of Season 3 of Emily in Paris only makes it more likely that I’ll watch it. For reasons I don’t fully understand at the moment, there’s nothing you can say about this vile series that would stop me from watching it.” he wrote on Twitter Journalist Imogen West Knights. “God, how I hate and love Emily in Paris. I can only keep watching this empty trash TV just to see what this bitch will do this time and what a hideous dress she will wear to go wild in my beloved city.” said the podcaster pip jones And back in 2020, critic Willa Waskin commented on Slate that Emily in Paris fell squarely into the category of “hate watches,” the ones that “put you in an awkward position about yourself and your tastes.”
“This bubbling, capitalist fantasy belongs to a category of programs that is very easy to judge. It’s a romantic comedy in a foreign land where nothing bad ever happens and the cute protagonist fucks a lot and gets what she wants,” writes Waskin. “But the best thing about Emily in Paris, which takes it from the light and entertaining series it could have been into a drama everyone loves to insult, is the weakness of its protagonist.”
Far from being a complex female character, Emily embodies several clichés in an almost grotesque way: above all, that of the American expatriate who arrives in an unfamiliar context and expects him to adapt to her; but also that of Millennials, obsessed with social networks and willing to post hundreds of photos identical to those already posted by thousands of other people in order to gain an online following.
– Also read: Ukrainian Minister of Culture criticizes “Emily in Paris”
Particularly irritating to the viewer is the fact that Emily, while portrayed essentially as an insipid, inexperienced, foolish, moralistic, and unoriginal person – surrounded instead by people who seem to have far more formed and interesting intellects and tastes than her – she remains the protagonist and in the end everything always goes the way she wants it to. She gets the attention (even the love) of beautiful men she meets by chance, lives in extraordinary apartments despite the well-known housing shortage in Paris, amasses tens of thousands of followers on Instagram by posting things that in real life she would only have a dozen likes at most convinces companies that invoice millions of euros a year to entrust their communication strategy with so-called strokes of genius. In the third season, he even lands on the cover of the culture magazine Le Monde as one of the most influential people in Paris.
“We’re talking about a woman who, on her first day at work, wears a French cap and a blouse embroidered with small Eiffel Towers and openly admits that she doesn’t speak the language. At best, it’s embarrassing. At its worst, it is a living embodiment of US cultural imperialism. In short, Emily is the antagonist of her own series, despite her dubious moral conduct,” wrote Catherine Wheatley, professor of film studies at King’s College London, in The Conversation. “Given the ongoing demonization of Americanism within the show, to love Emily in Paris would be to love exactly what the show tells us to hate.”
(netflix)
Boston Globe journalist Matthew Gilbert tried to explain the love-hate relationship he feels with Emily in Paris: “I wanted to see something cute and silly, but mostly cute: after all, the series is a tour of Paris at its most dazzling form”.
Other “hate-watchers” interviewed by the New York Post said they enjoy watching glamorous people walking around doing silly things in strange cities that are beautiful to look at, even more so when those people are making terrible decisions meet that allow the viewers to judge you. “Nobody learns anything. Nobody grows. Emily is the protagonist as well as a passenger in a Parisian taxi. But it’s not an aggressive or irritating series. It’s just beautiful and it’s there.”
Emily in Paris tells the kind of story where it’s safe to assume that nothing really shocking or bad will ever happen to the protagonist and her friends, allowing you to watch her absently in the background of other activities as she checks for news about her answers mobile phone or house cleaning. Two years ago, after the first season aired, New Yorker critic Kyle Chakya theorized that most people see the show primarily as the prime example of “ambient television”:
The series seems to be saying it’s okay to look at your phone all the time because Emily does too. The plots are too thin to lose the thread. If you look up at the TV again, you’ll likely see tracking shots across the Seine or cobbled streets, beautiful but meaningless. (…) Like smooth New Age music, Emily in Paris is soothing, slow and relatively monotonous, its dramatic moments too predictable to be truly dramatic. Nothing bad actually happens to our protagonist.