Emily in Paris Season 2 and the Fantasy of Being Anxiety-Free

Beware of spoilers. You can read my opinions on season 1 here:

When the first season of Netflix’s dramedy series “Emily in Paris” got slammed and ridiculed by critics and audiences alike, the show took it the same way its heroine takes anything - with a shrug, a smile, and the deep conviction that any gaffe could be turned into profitable social media exposure. As it turns out, the show (along with Emily) was probably right. No amount of bad press could prevent the second season from happening and… well, people are watching it. They may be dubbing it a ‘guilty pleasure’ and scoffing at the vapidness of its heroine, but they are watching. And, as the series teaches us, that’s pretty much the only thing that matters.

In my article discussing the first season (linked above), I expressed my fear that, whatever her failings, Emily is far better equipped to live in the modern world than I am. Season 2 takes this to a deeper level. It’s no longer just about the fact that she is generally perky, perpetually happy and unabashedly herself. Nothing can shake her!

Emily at Work

In Season 1 her optimism and positive attitude seemed somewhat justified by her successes. Her colleagues were prejudiced against her but that was ‘just because they were French’, and they were constantly proven wrong whenever she stuck to her guns. She was largely innocent of any real wrongdoing. In Season 2, however, Emily genuinely mucks up more than once, and yet she continues to go on her merry way with little more than an ‘oopsie!’. She somehow manages to antagonise all of the clients she is working with - and for fairly valid reasons this time! At the start of the season she has agreed to go on a romantic trip to Saint-Tropez with a client, right before sleeping with another man. (No, the fact that the other man is sexy chef Gabriel who is most likely meant to be her romantic endgame does not make this any better.) The client, understandably feeling led on, literally gets off a moving train when he accidentally finds out what happened. And what does he do? He sends Emily on the holiday alone, all expenses paid. Rather than sinking into the ground with embarrassment and looking for a way to make it up to him, our heroine ends up having a grand old time on this trip with her girlfriends, causing even more disasters on the way. She unknowingly meets another client’s long-term nemesis (seriously, shouldn’t she have studied her own clients enough to know who that is?) and allows them to trick her into aiding them with a social media stunt that enrages and possibly harms her client. What in the world is her job if not knowing details about the people she works for? How is she supposed to promote them if she is not aware of years-long public feuds? On top of all else, she annoys everyone by incessantly snapping shots and videos of everything, calling her colleagues all the time and yammering about work while people are trying to have a relaxed weekend. This is not even half of it, but you will have to watch to find out the rest.

Is This Girl Human?

Outside of work things aren’t any better. Rather than coming clean like an actual adult, she hides the fact that she slept with Gabriel from his ex-girlfriend Camille (who is her friend and who is trying to decide if she should get back together with Gabriel) until the situation predictably blows up in her face. Afterwards, she strings along the new resident hottie (who has, of course, inexplicably fallen in her lap), once again not telling him about her history with Gabriel or coming clean about the fact that she has romantic feelings for the chef. So many bad moves would have most anxiety-ridden millennials like me practically paralysed with guilt and worry. Not Emily! She basically swims through it all with barely a frown. It’s not that she is too selfish to care - she wants to fix her mistakes and tries to do so, albeit not well. She just seems incapable of mustering up any sort of deep emotion, especially a negative one… And this, friends, might be the subtle secret appeal of “Emily in Paris”! It is a fantasy-fulfilment show but not in the way you might think. It’s not really about living in Paris, wearing expensive clothes and being popular on social media. It’s about living without stress and anxiety! My generation is eternally stressed and deeply anxious. Emily is not. She is not a real person, she is some kind of mental health superhero I can easily imagine some of us secretly wanting to be. Step aside, Wonder Woman, the era of Stressless Girl has arrived!

Everyone Is Rude, Except Ukrainians. They’re Just Criminals.

It seems to be a staple of the show that someone has to be cartoonishly rude and some European nation must be insulted.

On the rudeness front, Emily’s co-workers have mellowed somewhat so, in order to fill the quota, two characters in succession take up the mantle. The first is Alphie, a Londoner from Emily’s French class who is cold and impolite for absolutely no good reason until he develops the hots for her. He doesn’t care about Paris. He doesn’t care about learning French. He’s been forced to be there. He refuses to take anything seriously, he rather cheekily invites himself to a party, and he tells Emily she’s boring. Um… charming?

Then there’s Emily’s pregnant American boss Madeline who arrives in Paris mid-season to be a cartoonish surprise villain and make Emily look like ‘the good American’ by comparison. Madeline really is a non-person. She is there for the sole purpose of being awful. Remember, this is the same woman whose place inexperienced monolingual Emily took at the start of the series. Madeline had prepared for this post, was supposedly more competent and really wanted to take it before she learned she was having a baby. Well, scratch that - apparently, she is not competent, she is obnoxious, because nobody can be more competent than our heroine. She knows French, but I guess she doesn’t get any points for that, even though everybody and their dog has been giving Emily grief for not having learned the language yet. She is the villain because she wants to get someone fired for what is genuinely inappropriate conduct harming the company. She can’t do that in a sensible, polite way because then we would perhaps immediately realise she has a point. So she has to be exceedingly unpleasant and patronising towards everyone.

As for our disrespect-towards-non-Americans quota, the show somehow manages to be more insulting to Ukrainians than it ever was to French people in Season 1. Emily has a Ukrainian lady named Petra in her French class with whom she is partnered. They are supposed to practise the language together. In short, Petra is portrayed as odd, and apparently loves stealing things from department stores. Because… that’s the Ukrainian national sport, I guess? We never learn anything else about her. Nicely done, show, nicely done. What is it exactly that you’re trying to say?

There seems to be an honest attempt to develop some of the side characters. Emily's best friend continues to struggle with her music and develops a romance... which is hindered by the fact that she's very rich. Um, poor little rich girl, I guess? Her co-workers are slightly fleshed out, although not by much. He boss starts a relationship with a much younger man and has to deal with the implications of that. For a moment it almost seems like the series is trying to actually say something about women and getting old and relationships. But, for the most part, everyone is just kind of awful to each other and then they move on.

Conclusion

Emily somehow manages to be both an object of ridicule and an impossible ideal to aspire to for viewers. We want to hate her for her entitlement and mediocrity… and yet we can’t help but envy her cloudless existence. In her world, not only does everything turn out for the better, but even when bad things happen she is, to a large extent, emotionally unaffected by them. Any messes she ends up in have no real consequences. Ultimately, no clients are lost, nobody is upset with her in any way that matters and she ends the season basking in her French colleagues’ appreciation when they invite her to join the new marketing company they are starting after resigning in protest of Madeline’s five minutes of a tyrannical rule.

In a nutshell, the second season of “Emily in Paris” is a guilty pleasure which sells the fantasy of living guilt-free. Can we learn anything from it? Probably not. But can maybe enjoy spending some time in the company of characters who are much less burdened than anyone in real life.

P.S. - A couple of small side notes:

1. Look, I’ll admit it - I very much enjoy taking photos and posting about what I’m up to. But even I, with my love of the limelight, was a little bit taken aback by how utterly obsessed Emily is. And that’s never addressed! I am far from the idea that the show could or should present social media as an unhealthy thing, but there has to be some moderation! Emily’s life seems to take place entirely inside her phone and nobody seems to find that unusual.

2. I wasn’t going to comment on the fashion because I am by no means a fashion expert, but some of these outfits… Come on! Surely nobody goes to work dressed like that? Not even in France? Heck, surely nobody goes almost anywhere dressed like that!