Emily in Paris

The Plastic Eiffel Tower

Paris in *Emily in Paris* does not look like a city so much as a luxury screensaver. There is no grime, no traffic worth mentioning, barely any weather, and apparently no one who is not dressed for a fashion campaign. Emily Cooper moves through it like she has been animated on a separate layer: an eternally upbeat Midwestern marketing executive dispatched to teach the French how Instagram works. Whether that setup reads as airy fantasy or cultural aggression probably comes down to your personal tolerance for weaponized cheerfulness.



Darren Star built a career out of aspirational cities, and you can feel the *Sex and the City* DNA all over this thing. The difference is that Carrie Bradshaw’s New York occasionally let some grit seep through. This Paris is sealed in acrylic. The camera gazes at Lily Collins’s wide-eyed face with near-religious devotion, and the flat lighting burns away any shadow that might hint at a life beyond the postcard. Early on, Emily buys her first *pain au chocolat*, takes a pristine bite, snaps a selfie, and beams. Not a crumb falls. The pastry barely reads as food. It looks like a prop from a branded content shoot. She is not living inside a culture; she is uploading it.

As *Jacobin* put it, the show promises "a world without losers, and with it a withdrawal from reality." That gets at what makes the series so weirdly tiring. Every problem Emily faces melts under the heat lamp of a clever pitch and a hashtag. You keep waiting for actual failure, for the city to push back or for her confidence to crack, but the show refuses to let her take a real bruise.



Which is why Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu feels like such a gift. As Sylvie, Emily’s elegantly unimpressed boss, she is one of the few people onscreen carrying any weight at all. The role was first written for a woman in her late thirties, but casting Leroy-Beaulieu in her fifties shifts the temperature completely. It stops being simple workplace friction and turns into a full generational clash.

Just watch her when Emily launches into one of those relentlessly synergistic marketing pitches. Sylvie does not waste time with theatrical eye-rolling. Her neck tightens a touch, her jaw firms up, and she pinches the cigarette between her fingers like it might double as a weapon. The performance is all tiny cuts. Leroy-Beaulieu gives us a woman who had to carve out space in a male world, now staring at a younger woman who thinks a ring light can solve every problem. (And honestly, her irritation feels earned.)



*The Guardian* called it "an excruciating exorcism of French cliches," which is hard to argue with. The men are pushy charm machines; the women are glamorous and unfaithful. And still, I cannot quite hate it.

There is something hypnotic about how completely it declines to touch real life. It is like eating cotton candy: aggressively bright, absurdly sweet, and gone the second you bite down. I just wish the show would let Emily stand in the rain long enough to smudge.