Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Emily in Paris returns for the second half of its new season… and all the goodwill established earlier is out the window.
Emily in Paris: Season 4
I take my previous defence of Emily in Paris’s fourth season back. Regrettably, in this second batch of episodes, it’s become guilty of what I’ve come to deem as any early sign of imminent collapse: everyone, suddenly and inexplicably, has developed incurable anger issues. All should be well, except one character can now barely breathe without another jumping down their throat, coming to absurd conclusions, and turning every interaction into a verbal spar.
We exited the first half of season four in a relatively good place for American expat Emily (Lily Collins) and her Gallic chef paramour Gabrielle (Lucas Bravo). She’d finally picked him over Brit Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) at the climactic masquerade ball, while dressed like a character from Miraculous Ladybug, with the promise that they might now actually have a crack at a proper relationship.
Yet, the series’s persistent commitment issues mean that it takes less than an episode for Emily and Gabrielle to stumble back into the will-they-won’t-they zone. Even worse, Emily blows up at him after a single incident, in which, god forbid, she’s expected to ski down a slope without a male escort.
Emily has never been someone you’d describe as selfless. That’s key to her appeal, isn’t it? She’s us at our most delusional, convinced she’s the main character of the entire nation of France. But she’s lurched into monster territory all of a sudden, specifically in the way she deals with the inevitable fallout of Gabrielle’s ex-fiancé Camille (Camille Razat) and her discovery that her pregnancy was actually a false positive. At no point does sunny Emily ever consider how deeply psychologically damaging that kind of news must be for those involved.
It’s always been easy to spot the narrative wheels spinning on Emily in Paris, but those calories feel particularly empty on this new batch of episodes. Whatever progress was made in part one has been undone in part two: the time Emily spent trying to navigate the mature path through all the Gabrielle vs Alfie drama; the choice boss Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) made to stand with the victims of her former boss, Louis de Léon; and the progress BFF Mindy (Ashley Park) achieved by choosing her self-worth over the affections of her boyfriend, and de Léon’s son, Nicolas (Paul Forman).
All that, pretty much, is out the window now. Sylvie is unscrupulous once more. Mindy frets because Nicolas doesn’t like that she’s booked a headline slot at Paris’s famously risky cabaret venue Crazy Horse. And Emily’s emotional regression is hastened by the appearance of Sylvie’s step-daughter, Genevieve (Thalia Besson). Now, there’s another young, beautiful, and savvy American on the scene. And this one, mon dieu, can actually speak French. That drives Emily to the brink of insanity.
One self-indulgent, rather mortifying cameo from Brigitte Macron, wife of French president Emmanuel, later, and Emily in Paris has thrown yet another romantic rival into the mix, Italian cashmere heir Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini). His appearance allows the camera crew to jet off to Rome and Collins to live out her Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday fantasies. But so much has been walked back over the course of season four, that its cliffhanger end feels more like a shrug, since there’s absolutely no guarantee its consequences will survive the next season premiere. There’s always some other handsome man, from some of other corner of Europe, waiting around the corner.
