Let Emily sleep in Paris

Photo: stephanie branchu/STEPHANIE BRANCHU/NETFLIX

If you’ve been keeping up with the labyrinthine plot of Émile Zola’s chronicle of contemporary life in the City of Lights known as Emily in Parisyou may have been excited to discover that as the show’s fourth season begins, Emily Cooper is single! This is big news because rarely has our American heroine not had a boyfriend. She started the show with her questionable friend from Chicago (played by the guy who also played Prince Charles in Diana: The musicalsomething important only to me), then quickly fell in love with her conveniently located chef neighbor Gabriel. He has a girlfriend, the French blonde Camille, but after ups and downs, Gabriel and Emily meet. Later, there’s a love triangle between them and British businessman Alfie, who talks like he’s auditioning for a role in a Guy Ritchie movie. For complicated reasons involving a hot air balloon and Camille’s secret lesbian relationship/surprise pregnancy, by the time season four begins, Emily is dating both Gabriel and Alfie and, as announced in the show’s trailer, is free to run. Paris in a seasonally inappropriate vest that overlooks many hot men in Paris.

When I watched that trailer, I thought that was a fun idea! Emily should enjoy some sex dans la cité. But alas, once I compulsively watched the screenings made available to critics, I discovered that Emily wasn’t actually going to have the time of her life as a single girl, tasting all the flavors of Paris like Julia Child on a sex farm. market. As soon as she returns from her run in episode three, she finds Gabriel sitting in her apartment shower (Camille and her friend have taken over his apartment; the most realistic thing about this show is the lack of available housing) and returns to her grueling dynamic with he. The episode ends with a lavish masquerade party where, what a surpriseboth Alfie and Gabriel realize they still have feelings for her.

The whole Emily and Gabriel thing at this point has been well played, and the show is struggling to come up with new ways to keep it fresh. This season’s complications: He’s worried about Camille’s pregnancy; he really wants a Michelin star but hates the pastry chef he hired to round out his menu (it’s fun; I like French-on-French violence); and he and Emily have sex on a rooftop, which she finds shocking and scandalous. By the end of this half-season, the romantic universe of Emily in Paris he feels smaller than ever. Do these people ever talk to anyone else?

This is an issue built into the structure of the series. Emily, perhaps true to her millennial Adderall-y type, isn’t particularly flirtatious. It’s bright and sunny and she wants it Think herself as fun, but rarely pushes herself outside her comfort zone. While her best friend, Mindy, is more of a Samantha-esque libertine, she too has become a serial monogamist – currently, she’s tied up in a rather serious story about sexual harassment and family inheritance, as she meets the descendant of a luxury. conglomerate with a terrible father (although it’s fun that actor Paul Forman and Ashley Park are dating in real life). The show’s French characters are more comfortable with business, at least; Sylvie had a husband and, for a while, a man on the side.

But Emily in Paris missing a mechanism to introduce a wider spectrum of characters for these people to interact with romantically. The show is really defined by work, not love – Emily is always meeting new clients and rarely meeting new lovers. Those clients themselves are rarely loved, but not because Emily herself has a healthy work-life balance; she happily sells her relationship with Alfie for an ad campaign and does pro bono social media work for Gabriel’s restaurant. (I guess they eat there for free… hey!) That’s fine, and may be part of a larger point about American capitalism spreading abroad or something. But I wish there were more men! Unlike Sex and the CityHis New York — or the other project Darren Star New York Youngerwhich threw Hilary Duff and Sutton Foster into some strange flings with publication types alongside their main love interests – Emily in ParisHis Paris is quite small and increasingly claustrophobic. In the Star universe, oddly enough, there is more fun at home than abroad.

In the interest of being solution-driven and thinking ahead like a good American with a pitch deck in hand abroad, we’ve created a short list of men in Paris that Emily should consider dating or just having an affair with instead of Alfie. and Gabriel. (I’d say she should consider women too, but that feels like a stretch for her, honestly.) The list includes:

• An annoying Left Bank intellectual who tells him about Sartre.
• A backpack on the way to the Alps.
• A rival chef of Gabriel’s who is his archenemesis, but she doesn’t realize it until after they hook up.
• A DJ.
• A deeply self-absorbed member of the Comédie-Française.
• Bradley Cooper, but he speaks French all the time because that’s what he likes to do to show off.
• A Minion.
• A Frenchman who is himself elementary and famous on Instagram, creating feelings of instability and confusion about Emily’s own identity.
• A German guy making those hacky TikToks about being German. He would like the engagement.
• Any cast member from the TV series Call my agent!
• Emmanuel Macron.
• That shirtless guy he saw running (he’s probably American since that’s not a very European activity, but that’s okay).
• An Olympic breakdancer.
• Léon Marchand.
• A man in Phryge Olympics mascot costume.

Emily, if you need any more suggestions, please contact us.