Another season of Emily in Paris has wrapped up and of course, right on schedule, it was worse than ever and therefore paradoxically better than ever. It is almost an achievement: a series that manages to sink so deeply into bad taste that it resurfaces as a top tier guilty pleasure.
Emily picks up exactly where she left off, relentlessly changing men like shirts, falling in love, falling out of love, hating, forgiving, getting jealous and not caring, all within a time span shorter than an Instagram story. How would it sound as an alternative title? How to Lose Ten Guys in Ten Days, in an unintentional and unfair comparison to the infinitely more inspired classic romantic comedy.
From the rest of the cast, the standout performance, in a negative sense of course, belongs to the snake friend Mindy, played by the almost talented Ashley Park. A character who feels like she escaped from Pluribus, with clear signs of lobotomy in her medical history and a complete absence of any notion of self respect. As for the men in the series? So what if they are manipulative, liars, toxic? Minor details. Everything is forgiven as long as the script keeps tossing out “twists” with the elegance of a wad of chewing gum.
All of this unfolds drenched in the clichés of every location, sometimes set against the stunning backdrop of Paris, or beautiful Rome, or gorgeous Venice. A postcard series, a tourist display with no soul, which might ultimately be where its ideal finale lies. I will leave that here and thank me later, you awful screenwriters. To reveal that Emily and her entire entourage were nothing more than placeholder characters in a battered postcard sketchbook, drawn by a desperate street artist of the Parisian streets. Fake, hollow, designed from the outset only to please the eye and the bed.
At least in that, we were well fed.
10/10 - it is rare to achieve something so bad that it ends up being so enjoyable
