The Olympics may be over, but the campy Parisian hijinks have only just begun, heralded by the arrival August 15 of Season 4 of Netflix’s unstoppably silly, occasionally chic Emily in Paris.
Given Netflix’s recent penchant for splitting its seasons into bits, this is only Part 1 of the new installment, suggesting that there’s much more in store for romantically challenged influencer Emily Cooper and her endless parade of European boyfriends and sassy French coworkers. And good thing too, because in the first five episodes of the season, nothing much seems to be going on.
Four seasons in, Emily in Paris is feeling the churn. To be clear, this show, despite its Darren Star pedigree, has never been particularly good. It’s funny and kitschy and novel, with an aspirational setting and the requisite amount of antics and misunderstandings expected from a half-hour comedy series, but at this point you’d think our characters would have made it further along in their lives.
I’m not talking about settling down and starting families, though that is one of this season’s many subplots. I just mean that barely anything has changed since the first episode of the first season. The characters move around the scenery of each new episode like flat paper dolls being tipped from one end of a page to another. Its “shocks,” such as they are, have become predictable, and its archetypal cast of characters has become frustrating.
Nonetheless, there is a plot to this first half of Season 4, and it’s as entertaining as anything else the show has cooked up.
Emily (Lily Collins) and her banker boyfriend Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) are on a break following the events of the explosive Season 3 finale non-wedding between chef Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) and Camille (Camille Razat). Camille is pregnant by Gabriel and is keeping the baby, though she doesn’t want a relationship with him, and ends up disappearing for the first few episodes while she sorts her feelings out.
Emily and Gabriel remain flirty, but Emily is determined not to fall into that trap again: Things between them get too messy too fast. Emily and Alfie, on the other hand, are equally chagrined to discover that they’re the new faces of Grateau’s latest marketing client, and that their nonexistent relationship has been pasted on billboards all over the city. Emily’s bestie Mindy (Ashley Park) has entered into the Eurovision Song Contest, and despite her wealthy boyfriend, she’s struggling to scrounge up the cash to pay for the necessary pyrotechnics.
It’s a lot, but it’s also sort of trivial, and the show’s breezy “everything’s fine” tone makes it seem doubly so, the more these woefully intertwined people manage to manipulate each other’s lives. Whenever any character is on a high, you know there will be a low by the end of the episode, so what’s the point in enjoying any of it? No one can touch another person on this show without a third person peeking through the crack in the doorway, feeling bad about it.
The series’ only goal seems to be to keep doing whatever remains interesting, and it seemingly believes that the only interesting thing is to keep mixing up the love quadrangle between Emily, her bore of a boyfriend, her chef soulmate, and the chef soulmate’s mopey ex. Even occasional appearances from the enfant terrible couture designer played by Jeremy O. Harris lend the show merely a tiny spark of excitement.
The only truly compelling thread this season, so far, follows Emily’s boss Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), who is chafing under the stress of juggling her former flame, the famous perfumer Antoine (William Abadie), and the demanding owner of a luxury fashion conglomerate whose behavior may be a tad problematic. Her scenes, as always, feel like they’re part of a different, more mature show for actual adults—one that makes the rest of Emily in Paris look like Cocomelon.
Really, the best reason to keep watching is to see all the nutty outfits Lily Collins is saddled with this time around, and this season does have its standouts, including an incredible royal-blue suit and a black-and-white candy-striped masquerade number paired with a giant hat.
I don’t pretend to know anything about fashion, and I certainly won’t learn anything from this particular show, but it’s always fun to see the wardrobe department going full-out on something like this while other shows dress their cast in a sea of crewnecks and black trousers. Emily in Paris has never fit into any sort of streaming TV mold, and I only wish its writing had the same daring sensibility.
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