Devil wears Prada meets Sex in the City.
Ok, ok, I have to admit, these days I’m just watching things on Netflix because A It’s new, and B because it’s trending. As ‘Emily in Paris’ really shouldn’t be my thang. Right?
Emily in Paris is the name of Emily Cooper’s Instagram handle, serving the purpose for her friends to follow while she spends a year working and living in France. As a Marketing specialist, she takes up the opportunity to live and work in Paris when her boss couldn’t do so, thus from Chicago she finds herself in the city of love.
Like Devil wears Prada, her French boss at the marketing firm her US company had just acquired, is a real ‘Dragon’ who is outwardly hostile and patronising towards her. And like Anne Hathaway’s character in DWP, Emily is also hard working, ever trying to please her boss, and the actor Lily Collins who plays Emily even appearance wise resembles Anne Hathaway a bit, just a more petite version of the dark-haired beauty.
Where Emily in Paris reminds me of ‘Sex and the City’, is due to the setting within a major city, and also the fact that our protagonist seems to find herself “intimate” with a fair few Frenchmen (I counted 4).
I actually found the romcom enjoyable enough, smashing through the 10 episodes in less than 5 days and although there hasn’t been word of a second series in the works- but I do hope they’ll be renewed for a second go around in Paris.
Likes: Since we can’t travel, at least we can travel vicariously through Emily’s time in Paris; I liked that they featured a confident Asian character as Lily’s confidant in Paris; the show was very now, Instagram playing a starring role- probably the most front & centre I’ve ever seen a social networking site to be since the ‘Social Network’; and it was nice to be reminded of what awaits us post-Covid, when global travel is back on the cards and social distancing is a thing of the past so the French can continue to ‘kiss’ greet one another.
Dislikes: Now that we can’t travel, this feeling of longing to be Overseas has been magnified since watching Emily in Paris; And I think we can stop sucking up to the Chinese already! Ok, I’m Chinese but we don’t have to place them up on a pedestal like depicting all Chinese as being rich and frivolous, highly educated with British or American accents, and they all have super wealthy parents. I almost long for the days when next-gen Chinese were stereotyped as only being kids of restaurateurs and dry cleaners- as that’s probably closer to reality than the ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ depiction (BTW, the actor who plays Mindy is actually an American Korean); and I know that we’re addicted to our phones and obsessed with trying to accumulate more likes and more followers, but Emily in Paris reminds us of all that is bad about our society ATM, that wealth, fame and success is all dependent on how many followers we can influence; and watching the French being French, so dates the series as being a pre-Pandemic world. It’s just a little depressing to think how much, and which aspects of post-pandemic life will never be the same again- let’s just hope that after there’s a vaccine, the French will continue to double kiss greet one another, and still sleeps with random strangers just because their cute. *Sigh*.
Ok, if you have a spare 5 hours on the couch this weekend, check out Emily in Paris it’ll definitely remind you of 2019, the good, the bad, and the ugly!
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