Emily and Gabriel’s slow, tortured dynamic has worn out its welcome on the Netflix hit, as has their biggest hurdle to date: Gabriel’s ex-girlfriend Camille.
Years after mounting what became the quintessential will-they-won’t-they TV romance, the creators of Friends suggested that mistakes were made with Ross and Rachel. Unaware their sitcom would last for a decade, the writers got the characters together far too early in the show’s run, which led to breaking them apart and later pairing off Monica and Chandler as the more stable yin to Ross and Rachel’s chaotic yang.

Watching the latest season of Emily in Paris, it became evident that this Netflix romantic comedy has made the opposite error: uniting its own on-and-off couple way too late. After three seasons of watching Lily Collins’s dubiously dressed American advertiser Emily pine over Lucas Bravo’s hot French chef Gabriel, the characters finally gave their simmering romance a shot in season four. But only six episodes later, the flame had been snuffed out once more, never to be reignited by the season’s end.

Series creator Darren Star is no stranger to a slow-build love affair. The triangle between Younger’s Liza and her competing love interests, Charles and Josh, persisted until the series finale, and Sex and the City was famously able to drag out Carrie and Big’s nonsense from New York to Paris to the big screen. But the TV mogul has hit a snag with his latest series, which wasn’t helped by Netflix’s decision to split the latest season in two. Unsurprisingly, Emily in Paris does not possess the story heft of Stranger Things, or even Bridgerton, to merit such a gap.

Although the show’s writers had three previous seasons to decipher what an Emily and Gabriel relationship would entail, it still feels like the show hasn’t quite figured out how to script them as a full-fledged couple when they get together in season four. The honeymoon period of their courtship is frustratingly short-lived (more scenes of Emily and Gabriel’s foreplay at his restaurant, please!), and conflict comes early thanks to the presence of Gabriel’s ex-girlfriend Camille (Camille Razat), who is carrying his child.

Initially, there is some juice to be squeezed out of a three’s-company dynamic involving Emily, Gabriel, Camille, and, for a while, Camille’s Greek artist girlfriend, Sofia (Melia Kreiling). “They’re jamming his apartment like a clown car,” Emily confides in her best friend Mindy (an ever-underutilized Ashley Park) when the other couple sets up shop in Gabriel’s home. But once Sofia leaves Camille in a jealous fit—and Camille learns that her pregnancy was a false positive—the character starts to drag down Emily in Paris’s whole escapist operation.

To reference Emily’s favorite movie, The Sound of Music: How do you solve a problem like Camille? She was once the amusing, cool-French-girl foil to our titular character’s clumsy American, and her long romantic history with Gabriel proved a compelling roadblock for Emily. But now that Camille and Gabriel have decided to just be friends, and their unborn child never existed, there is no reason for her to still be hanging around on the show.

Like Joel on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or, god help us, Ellis on Smash, Camille has overstayed her welcome on Emily in Paris. Armed with nothing but the promise of a pregnancy, she resorts to hiding the truth about the baby’s existence during a Christmas ski trip that both Emily and Gabriel are on (that’s right, she pulls a Terri Schuester on Glee). This deceit mercifully only lasts a single episode, but it unceremoniously ends Gabriel and Emily’s relationship. During said ski trip, Emily realizes that as long as Gabriel and Camille are becoming a family, she will forever be a third wheel. But once Camille tells Gabriel she’s lost the pregnancy (while conveniently failing to mention that there was no baby to begin with), Gabriel finds other reasons to ice Emily out—namely, his sudden anger that she can’t retain a word of French. Understandable, but where is this coming from?

Camille pops in toward the end of the season to declare that she’s adopting a baby but is otherwise out of the picture. Unburdened by all of the baby mama drama, the back half of Emily in Paris season four is a lot more fun. Emily is back to spouting off her silly little observations (“I’ve never been to Italy, but I’ve been to Eataly. Does that count?”), and she’s got a new love interest in the form of Italian businessman Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini). Plus, the show wisely introduces its first full-fledged villain in Sylvie’s stepdaughter and new employee, Genevieve, played by Thalia Besson, Luc Besson’s daughter. Genevieve poses an All About Eve-esque threat to Emily in that she’s an American who can actually speak French—and seems hell-bent on using that skill to interfere with Emily and Gabriel’s relationship.

In the season finale, Emily has left the Gabriel drama in Paris and gone on a Roman holiday with Marcello. But her personal getaway morphs into a major professional obligation when she lands Marcello’s family’s business as a client. Despite not speaking a lick of Italian, Emily’s boss, Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), taps her to run their company’s Rome office. But Gabriel won’t let Emily go quietly.

After his restaurant earns a Michelin star, Gabriel receives a congratulatory voicemail from Emily—delivered entirely in broken French. Gabriel is predictably charmed by the gesture and presumably headed to Rome to make Emily a whole bunch of pinky-ring promises he’s unlikely to keep in a potential fifth season. But, unlike Ross and Rachel, some might prefer the fact that one half of this couple stays in Paris.