03 December 2024

By Ann Biedermann

The Netflix series Emily in Paris is not to everyone’s taste, to say the least. It is the story about twenty-something year old Emily who moved to Paris to help a French luxury marketing company develop “an American perspective”. Soon after its release on Netflix, the show was criticized for its borderline racist depiction of the French as lazy and only out for sexual encounters. The show treated them as inferior to the American, capitalist logic and ridiculed their “obsession” in arts and fine cuisine. But the racism did not stop there; the only Asian character constantly voices racist comments about Asians. The one Eastern European character is of course, a shop lifter. At this point, The Ukrainian government voiced their discontent with the show for proliferating the stereotype of the stealing Eastern European woman[1].

The French online community was less than amused about the show. The YouTube essay “Emily in Paris: Romanticizing Ignorance” by French youtuber Friendly space ninja highlights everything wrong with this show and has, as of today, more than 10 million views[2]. Offline, graffiti’s with “Emily not welcome” appeared all over Paris[3].

On a less serious note, the show is simply not a good show: the viewer is presented with an unconvincing narrative, flat characters and an unintentionally unlikeable protagonist. Every man Emily encounters is a handsome, white, six-packed, French adonis who tries everything to get into her pants and at work she can’t stop having one brilliant idea after the other. On her lunchbreak she becomes an Instagram influencer so popular even Brigitte Macron tags her post. And above all, her shortcomings are considered fun and quirky: Emily sleeps both with her best friend’s boyfriend and her brother who is only 17 (what a good friend, haha!).  The general public was so surprised about its Golden Globe nomination that this discontent spiralled into an investigation of bribery of the Foreign Press Association[4]. In a nutshell, the show is a mess and everything around it is even worse.

Yet. Here I sit, hate-watching the first half of the fourth season, yelling at my screen everything I hate about the show. And why do I do this? I could NOT spend my precious time watching something I hate. But the reason why I (and so many others) enjoy hate-watching might be surprising. Sara Ahmed states

„we do not love and hate because objects are good or bad, but rather because they seem ‘beneficial’ or ‘harmful’. Whether I perceive something as beneficial or harmful clearly depends upon how I am affected by something.“[5]

So how does Emily in Paris affect me? I think for me and many others it was the timing of the show. It premiered on Netflix in October of 2020. The world was shy of its second lockdown. Emily in Paris could have been my escapism, my nostalgia of when I could freely travel to foreign countries (or Paris) and the promise that these countries would wait for me when the world eventually returns to normalcy. But what I got was the story of an annoying twenty-something living in a Disneyfied, white-washed version of Paris who is exploiting her friends for business opportunities and engaging in morally questionable sexual intercourse. 

Now, in 2024, watching Emily in Paris is a window to that weird time when I first watched it, a time with lots of sacrifices, hard ship and uncertainty. It reminds me of the things I took for granted and helps me recognize the privileges I enjoy again. It helps to yell at Emily for not appreciating what she has at her fingertips and, weirdly, reminding myself to not be as oblivious as she is. 

For me, it is beneficial to hate the show as a reminder to enjoy travelling, friendship and good TV again.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jan/03/ukraine-culture-minister-blasts-emily-in-paris-over-insulting-stereotype

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTLIIik_o2k

[3] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13020691/Emilys-NOT-welcome-Paris-Furious-locals-graffiti-shop-shutters-Lily-Collins-Netflix.html

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/emily-in-paris-golden-globes-judges-b1805390.html

[5] Ahmed, Sara (2004). Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge. 5-6.