By Shayne Watson
From the creator Darren Star, who is notoriously famous for the hit series “Sex and the City”, comes a new young adult special “Emily in Paris”, playing now on Netflix.
As someone who has only seen bits and pieces of
Star’s former show “Sex and the City”, from what
I can gather, “Emily in Paris” is basically the same
story template, just based in Paris instead of New
York.
It’s the classic tale that gets young women motivated to pack up their things and start a new life in a big city. Emily, played by Lily Collins, is the protagonist of the series who finds herself on a spontaneous journey to Paris to build her marketing career. During this journey, she meets a lot of men, builds her social media platform as well as her marketing strategy and faces tricky obstacles along the way.
You would think an American living in a foreign country that she doesn’t speak the language of would be difficult, but everything comes way too easy for Emily. So easy, it borderline lacks a plot. Everything is just handed to Emily with no work put into it at all, which is completely unrealistic.
Within the first three minutes of the first episode, Emily already is offered the lucky chance to go to Paris due to her superior being pregnant. There is absolutely no conflict in the series. Every problem
Emily has gets resolved within five minutes.
With the series having 10 episodes, each about 30
minutes long, I can understand why certain aspects
of the show weren’t as in-depth as they should have
been. But I feel like the story would have been more
effective if they didn’t try to shove a new problem
in every episode and stuck with just one romantic
interest instead of five.
From someone who has been to Paris, they did a pretty good job representing the city and the people in it. Paris is just as beautiful as Star made it out to be, and the people portrayed are quite accurate.
In my experience, French people do not like to sugarcoat things. They will always be brutally honest. But once you get talking, are respectful, they will open up to you.
The main issue with Emily was that she didn’t even bother to learn French when she’s living in Paris working for a French marketing firm. From the French perspective, it seems a little disrespectful to not even try to engage in the language or the culture, so the way they treated her is justified.
Even though I thought the story was pointless,
I did catch myself binge-watching it all in a day. The series is no award-nominated piece, but it is an interesting watch that succeeds in making you want to run away to a foreign country. If you loved “Sex and the City”, you’ll probably enjoy “Emily in Paris”. You just have to look past how completely unrealistic it all is.
