“Emily in Paris”
The show “Emily in Paris” was featured on Netflix on October 2 in 2020. The producer of the show wanted to make a series about a young girl’s chronicles in her professional and personal world involving all of the misadventures Emily Cooper experiences. Emily is an ambitious marketing executive on the rise who is dispatched to France to work under someone’s wing and display the American point of view to a vulnerable French marketing firm. When the show first came out, it grabbed the attention of 20-year olds who are about to start in the professional world and get some ideas of the ins and outs. The show recently came out with a second season where the audience began to take a turn for the worse. The Netflix series first season was nominated for best comedy at the Golden Globes and at the Emmys where people were not amused. People began to call the series “an artifact of contemporary dystopia”.
“Emily in Paris” was then said to be driving the viewers crazy and the audience began to not enjoy the show. Emily began to become a character of oblivion to the real world around her. When she moved to Paris, she assumed Paris would adapt to her meanwhile she is the one who has to adapt to Paris. The show makes her actions justified when in reality that would not slip in the real professional world. Social media is brought into the show to test Emily’s numbers and engagements on social media, where they make her seem very juvenile and more than unprofessional.
The show then was said to be “basic” according to myself and various other viewers. This show created a judgment free zone around Emily and made all of her actions seem normal and understandable. Meanwhile, if someone did that in your professional job in the office, you would not get the same acceptance that Emily did for the majority of her actions. The show was said to be basic because she is a super skinny rich white girl with a ton of first-world problems. That is where it gets critiqued the most because her issues are on the bottom of everyone’s major issues in real life and the show makes her little problems seem like the end of the world. The stereotype of Emily was used to get views and good ratings, meanwhile it backfired and the audience did not appreciate how “basic” the show was and how Emily was this American girl facing reality.
In the second season, the directors definitely took the criticisms to heart and made a lot of changes. Going from a very immature unprofessional show, the second season is more focused on how she becomes more aware of the real life factors of living in France. The show is overall very cringey but grows on people. For myself, it was too cringey to watch, but for being a 21 year old girl who wants to go into a similar profession. The show glamified the difficult obstacles she faced and didn’t show how to properly handle them.
The show made it easy for the audience to become audience surrogates. “Emily in Paris” made it seem so fun and easy to do what she is doing in Paris for this dream company. However, the ups and downs it takes to get there were either not shown at all or were shown as no big deal. The show did not dig into detail or depth of the marketing field but showed the fun side of it and the little issues that came along. Season 2 made Emily learn her lessons in the professional marketing field and gave better life lessons than the cringey fake season 1.
