"Emily in Paris"
Emily in Paris” is one of the Netflix’s shows which debuted on the platform this autumn. To be honest, I had huge expectations for this show and unfortunately, I am really disappointed. I was temped by the trailer which was promising and I was counting days to the premiere. I don’t particularly like the acting of Lily Collins (who plays the main character), but I decided to give this series a chance. The show presents a young American girl, Emily, who is going to work in Paris for a year as a replacement for her pregnant boss. It wouldn’t be something surprising, but there is a little problem-Emily doesn’t speak French. NOT A SINGLE WORD. Pardon, she knows ONE word (Hello-Bonjour), but she spells it incorrectly. Despite of this, she goes to France and discovers that not everybody there speaks English. What a surprise! She is going to work in an advertising agency, so her coworkers can speak English, but a plumber or a lady in a bakery can't,, so she needs to ask for help. Through the series she always shows “an American way” to do almost everything and that this way is always better than our European way. She helps with a few projects for campaigns and her idea is almost always the one that wins and is chosen by the clients. After third or fourth episode I stopped deceiving myself that this is going to change. In penultimate episode she gets fired, but in the end she is the one to save the day.
On YouTube you can find a lot of videos titled “What’s wrong with Emily in Paris?”, and unfortunately this series is full of stereotypes and shows the sugary life in Paris. I haven’t been in France, but I know many people who has and Paris doesn’t look like in the series. It's too clean, there are not many people, there are no immigrants! It looks like a small city in France and not like the capital of a country. The characters are shown in a very stereotypic way, especially the French cast: they come to work late, they are having an affair in a work place, they have affairs outside of marriage... But my greatest accusation is the main character. For me it is very arrogant and disrespectful to go to work on the different country without speaking their language. I think that is an American way of thinking: ”Everybody now speaks English, so I don’t have to learn any foreign language”. No, the world does not work like this and I found out that a lot of Americans think like that after watching this series.
Like I mentioned, she is successful in everything and this is really boring. I was not concentrated on others propositions, because I already knew whose project is going to win. There are also a few scenes that are supposed to be funny, but for me they are irritating: she constantly forgets that in Europe we count floors differently than in America-we have ground floor and then the first floor, the second.... Of course, one floor below her lives a very handsome guy, who is also a chef (what is very useful in one episode). It’s such a cliché! What she also doesn't knows is the fact that we write dates in a different way-day/month/year and in America it's month/day/year. In one episode, she needs to order a table in a very popular restaurant and of course she makes a mistake. She has ordered a table for 08/11/20, and the series is going on August. And when a man is explaining that to her, she’s answering with indignation “You reverse the dates!”. No, dear Emily the Americans revers the dates, not we. These are just 2 examples, but there is more of them, a lot more.
I really had huge expectations for the series and I’m really disappointed. Luckily, the show has only 10 episodes which are 30 minutes long, so you can watch it in one evening (I did). Netflix ordered a second season and I will watch it, but with less expectations and hoping that the creators do their job better.
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