For the last few weeks, Paris has reveled in its diversity, playing host to athletes of every creed and color from around the world.
The reviews for the Paris Olympics are in, and they are overwhelmingly positive, irrespective of moans about cardboard beds and a sodden opening ceremony.
Emily in Paris, which arrived with a new raft of episodes on Aug. 15, can only wish for such acclaim.
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Season 4 of the Netflix hit has been widely panned, with perhaps the most damning critic claiming it has “whitewashed” the City of Lights.
“One of the most egregious things about Emily in Paris is how it completely ignores the city’s racial and cultural diversity,” writes Pat Stacey in the Irish Independent.
“There’s a few non-white faces: Emily’s best friend is Asian (and even more shallow, annoying and materialistic than Emily), her gay friend and English Hunk are black.
“Otherwise,” Stacey adds, “this fantasy Paris is as whitewashed as Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill.”
Stacey says that Parisians “loathe” Emily in Paris and that the show was met with “a barrage of anger and hostility” when it premiered in 2020. The reviewer also slams the American Emily, played by Lily Collins, for making no attempt to learn French, concluding: “Merde totale.”
The Daily Beast’s reviewer, Emma Stefansky, was kinder, saying that while “nothing much seems to be going on,” the new episodes are still as “entertaining as anything else the show has cooked up.”
She adds later: “Really, the best reason to keep watching is to see all the nutty outfits Lily Collins is saddled with this time around, and this season does have its standouts, including an incredible royal-blue suit and a black-and-white candy-striped masquerade number paired with a giant hat.”
In the Guardian, reviewer Leila Latif writes that the show has “morphed into a black hole devoid of plot, charisma and intrigue.”
“To get annoyed by TV as blandly pleasant as Emily in Paris does at times feel like kicking a puppy. But don’t we deserve better?” she writes.
“But,” she adds, Emily’s “Disney princess approach to romance and unrelenting sweetness feels insidious—the centre of a series that has repackaged feminine empowerment with a pretty bow but is afraid to make its protagonist too messy, too horny or too flawed. It’s an Instagram filter on top of a Vaseline covered lens which renders its protagonist and its city charmless.”
