If you had to explain the allure of Emily in Paris, now in its fourth season, at a dinner party full of nuclear physicists, foreign-policy experts, and career military personnel, I’d wish you luck and leave the room. Plenty of people have had a field day pointing out the series’ lack of substance and other flaws: It stereotypes the French. No one in Paris, or anywhere, wears such ridiculous clothes. Emily, as played by Lily Collins, is pretty but uninteresting, and why, oh why, is she not fluent in French? Is she just an idiot? And yet, millions of people love this show. The allure of Emily in Paris—for women especially—is the kind of thing that has been held against our kind for centuries, long before any of us ever sighed over a selection of colored ribbons at the millinery counter or coveted a length of ballgown-ready silk. Old ideas take a long time to die: You gals stick with your frivolity and furbelows, while we men retire to the parlor with our cigars to talk about serious subjects.

Emily in Paris is ridiculous, but it’s not stupid. It is, for me, the embodiment of the idea of the ladies’ hat as seen in 1930s comedies and publicity stills. You see them on Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell: saucer-shaped oddities, caps shaped like dollops of frosting or aquiver with saucy netting. In Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, Greta Garbo wears an absurd—but awesome!—stylized hamhock on her head. Hats in those movies—pictures made in the hardest days of the Depression—were almost literal thought bubbles of joy and creativity. And it helps to remember that Emily in Paris, an amusement as frothy as a puff of tulle, arrived during a time that was, for many of us, marked by anxiety and isolation, death and loss.

A creation of Sex and the City auteur Darren Star, Emily in Paris debuted in October 2020, a few months before the Covid vaccine would allow any sort of gradual return to normal life. In the first episode, Collins’ late-twentysomething marketing executive Emily—capable and bright-eyed, the classic ingenue—learns she’s being dispatched to Paris. The Chicago company she works for has acquired a French luxury marketing firm called Savoir; her mission is to show the French how Americans do marketing. (She has a master’s in communications, a shiny fact she blurts out to anyone who cares, but mostly to anyone who doesn’t.) You can imagine how well her horrifyingly cheerful arrival goes over in the spare-chic Place de Valois offices of Savoir, where cool queen bee Sylvie Grateau (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), the kind of woman who wears architectural wonders of silk jersey to work, presides over a small staff serving a roster of quietly prestigious clients. Emily doesn’t fit in; she doesn’t even speak French. And her inability to understand this new work culture causes one problem after another.

 

But she also has a knack for turning her mistakes into triumphs, a classic Hollywood formula if ever there were one. Sylvie thinks she can drive Emily out by making her job miserable, assigning her to a decidedly unsexy accout, a feminine-hygiene product for “older” ladies. Inspired by her French 101-level understanding of masculine and feminine nouns, Emily floats a clever slogan on Instagram that goes viral after it’s reposted by Brigitte Macron. Sylvie openly sneers at how eager and vapid her young American employee appears to be. But she’s got to hand it to her: Emily kind of knows what she’s doing. And people—especially Parisian men, upon whom much of Sylvie’s business depends—really like her. Emily’s manic enthusiasm is both her most annoying quality and her chief asset.

How are we supposed to feel about her? Her charm offensive sure pushes the limit. But she’s guileless, too, surprisingly so for a smarty pants working in marketing. As Collins plays her, she has the zingy brightness of a cartoon squirrel. The show’s writing serves her well: when Emily effusively tells her new French co-workers about the time she and her mother rode scooters on Michigan’s Mackinac Island—for a fudge tour, no less—Sylvie rolls her eyes so hard we can hear them on this side of the Atlantic. (Never mind that in real life, scooters aren’t allowed on Mackinac Island—it’s the image that counts.) Just who is this young spud, anyway? And does she really belong in Paris? In an early episode, Emily’s two chief co-workers, Julien (Samuel Arnold) and Luc (Bruno Gouery), along with Sylvie, greet her with trilling faux-affection, calling her “le plouc” to her face. Emily doesn’t yet know that this means “hick.” And as any American visitor to Paris knows, it’s easy enough to feel like a hick among the city’s myriad unwritten rules, let alone its intimidating elegance.

Yet liking or not liking Emily is almost beside the point. She’s just the centerpiece for a show full of great second bananas. Gouery’s Luc is possibly my favorite, a Gallic string-bean goofball who skadoodles everywhere on his bicycle and invites Emily to lunch in his favorite spot, which just happens to be Père Lachaise Cemetery. (He likes to keep Balzac company.) Of all the show’s characters, Leroy-Beaulieu’s Sylvie is the most mysterious and complex. Is she fiftyish, sixtyish? We don’t really know, but she’s a woman of secrets whose sexual allure is off the charts. Her walk, a kind of hip-swiveling saunter, is an art unto itself. And if she’s frosty, she’s not closed off: occasionally she betrays a glimmer of amusement over Emily’s haplessness. She also gives her an elegant cigarette case as a birthday gift, knowing Emily doesn’t smoke, but reassuring her in a deadpan singsong, “Well, it’s never too late to start.” Naughty! But great.

There are more bananas: within her first few days in the city, Emily meets a new best friend, flirty, fun Mindy (Ashley Park), the disowned daughter of a rich Chinese “zipper king.” She also has a criminally good-looking downstairs neighbor, Gabriel (Lucas Bravo), who just happens to be a chef, because why not? The sparks fly from the start, before Emily learns that Gabriel is the boyfriend of another new friend, the sunny and ostensibly generous art gallerist Camille (Camille Razat), whose family owns a heritage Champagne company—because why not? In Season 2, Emily shifts her attention to a scrappy-sexy English banker named Alfie (Lucien Laviscount), who seems to take forever to warm up to her, only to fall possibly too hard.

 

Emily’s romantic choices—and her mistakes—provide endless fodder for the couples counselor in all of us. But maybe even more than that, this is a show about the cracked, imperfect romance of the workplace. Emily in Paris first appeared at a time when many people couldn’t go to their workplaces in person. Now, almost no one wants to go back to an office, as the plummeting values of commercial real estate in our cities tells us. But are we really ready to give up on the grand tradition of workplace comedies? When we look at them now, sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Barney Miller, and M*A*S*H tell us a lot about how we used to feel about showing up in the same place, weekday after weekday, to gossip with friends or mix it up with adversaries, to put up with—or learn how to manage—an annoying or downright hostile boss. A workplace is a mini-society, and even those who prefer working at home have to admit that the new model has torn holes in that sense of belonging. Maybe Emily in Paris—in which Julien is perfectly justified in resenting Emily for even unintentionally big-footing his campaigns, in which Sylvie’s crispness is a mask for all the feelings she doesn’t dare show, in which Luc can always be counted on to let loose with a blooper during an important client meeting—restores part of that lost world to us.

This is also a show about the adventure of reinventing yourself in a new city—and about the fantasy and playfulness of clothes. Emily’s outfits—tiny skirts, sky-high over-the-knee boots in shimmery leathers, handbags so teensy they can’t fit a cellphone—aren’t typical workgear. But the point, as with Sex and the City, isn’t realism. Patricia Field, who conceived Sarah Jessica Parker’s madcap getups for that show, is the consulting designer here. Marylin Fitoussi is credited as the show’s designer, and if some of her combos are SJP-wacky, her eye for color is pure delight, and works beautifully in the TV frame. She might put three characters in mix-and-match ensembles of black and white or cream—huddled together around a table, they form a trippy little pop-art collage. She also knows how to make the most of Collins’ high-contrast Snow White coloring, favoring clear yellows and candy reds, plus jade and electric blue—and lots and lots of metallics. These aren’t clothes you’d typically see on the streets of Paris, where understated colors and classic shapes rule the day, as do sneakers. Still, the Emily in Paris clothes preserve an idea of French fashion drama that’s perennial, really just a small jump from the days, in the 1980s and 1990s, when you might spot a Parisian on the street wearing a trim black skirt, sheer black hose, and the space-age touch of multicolored suede Maud Frizon pumps. There was a time when sneakers weren’t ubiquitous. The show reflects a version of that past back at us.

And like all vehicles capable of delivering delight, Emily in Paris carries threads of truth too. You can look at it and say, “The French aren’t really like that”—but if you’ve spent any time in Paris as a non-French-speaking American, you’ll recognize some real elements of both their impatience and their kindness. In an early episode, the proprietress of a patisserie corrects Emily, newly arrived from Chicago, as she stumbles her way through a croissant order. The woman is matter-of-fact but not unkind; why not show this kid something about how to conduct herself? Later, we see her posing with Emily in one of the latter’s ubiquitous selfies. She’s an ally, not an enemy, especially in a city that values the everyday encounter.

There are problems with Emily in Paris, which both Parisians and Americans have pointed out. It portrays Parisians on the street as almost exclusively white and affluent-looking. Emily, even after having lived in Paris for several years, is alarmingly slow to learn French. And like Sex and the City before it, the show has unleashed a floodgate of tourists: they pour into the city in jaunty berets, eager to visit the spots they’ve seen on the show. Parisians, I empathize: I remember the hordes of visitors toddling around my adopted home of New York, circa the early 2000s, in Carrie Bradshaw-style Manolo Blahniks. Didn’t they want to know what my beloved city was really like, instead of indulging in some false fantasy they’d seen on television?

But thinking back on that time, I catch myself. New York is a dirty, disorganized mess, and it’s ruinously expensive to live here. But I love it so much. I want people to come here, to look up and catch the gleaming futuristic glory of the Chrysler Building, or to stop into the Donut Pub on 14th Street for an old-fashioned and a cup of coffee. Similarly, Paris is beautiful and strong enough to handle any clueless, if well-meaning, tourists it might attract. Sure, it’s a place where real people live and work. But part of its job is to give pleasure. Have you ever gotten Parisians talking about Paris? Their eyes get all shiny; they tell you—correctly—that it’s the most beautiful and romantic city in the world. They have drunk a deep draft of the aide cool, and they don’t even hide it. Over and over again in Emily in Paris, Emily pauses—as she gazes at a nighttime city dotted with chrysanthemums of light, or walks across the very old city bridge that will always bear the name Pont Neuf—and blurts out, with a stunning lack of originality, “It’s so beautiful!” She’s ridiculous. She’s also right.