I Lived In France. Here's What Netflix's Emily In Paris Gets Wrong About Everything

In January of 2020, I moved to a little city called Paris, France. You may have heard of it! After I moved into my apartment, started pursuing a master's degree in creative writing at the Paris campus of the University of Kent, and figured out a few essential Métro lines, something horrible struck the city. In fact, it was the worst affliction to hit the City of Lights in all of 2020. It was the premiere of Darren Star's Netflix series "Emily in Paris" on October 2.

In all seriousness, despite the fact that my timing was legitimately terrible (Paris shut down entirely in mid-March of 2020, leaving ex-pats like me scared and potentially stranded while the world tried to figure out what the heck was going on vis-a-vis COVID-19), I wouldn't trade my time living there for anything. I'll be the first to admit that my French language skills are not great, but because I lived in the slightly-less-chic 14th arrondissement in the southern part of the city, I had to learn key phrases and pronunciations to get by. The Métro became my lifeline on nights out or on days where I needed to run errands. I shipped my stiletto heels home, realizing that sneakers and lug-sole boots were the best options to traverse the cobblestone streets of Paris, and I tried to assimilate as best as I could, shopping at outdoor markets for my biweekly grocery hauls (with my unfashionable but very Parisian portable grocery cart) and taking long walks around the city.

If you've watched even a minute of "Emily in Paris," some of this might sound strange to you. If that's the case, allow me to explain how and why this show gets everything, and I mean everything, wrong about living in France.

Growing pains are normal when you move to any new city, particularly one where you're not fluent in the language — so, it's not like I expected the titular Emily, played by Lily Collins, to speak perfect French immediately upon her arrival in Paris. Still, right from its very first moments, "Emily in Paris" gets a lot wrong about Paris.

The first issue is Emily's lodgings. An attic apartment in Paris, to oversimplify this a bit, is called a chambre de bonne. They are not glamorous. Usually, you share a bathroom with other people in the building, and the whole endeavor is for people who need the cheapest place possible and are willing to cut a lot of corners. Not only is this apartment provided for Emily by her workplace, which probably would upgrade her from a chambre de bonne, but her apartment is not a chambre de bonne at all. It's frankly way too big and has its own bathroom and just happens to be on the top floor.

Then there's the issue of how Emily gets to work every day. A normal Parisienne would take the sprawling, massive Métro system. Emily, however? I'm pretty sure she teleports in stilettos. Her workplace, in the 1st arrondissement (or 1éme, as it's styled in French), is a full 45-minute walk from her apartment in the 5éme. Sometimes, we see her in a cab — which is patently ridiculous, because the traffic is horrific — but she never so much as approaches a Métro station, as if she simply floats to work in a bubble every day like Glinda from "Wicked." Again, growing pains are normal, but these horrors persist throughout the series.

As "Emily in Paris" continues, you might think Emily Cooper would learn some French and attempt to assimilate. You would be one hundred thousand percent wrong, actually. Not only does Emily never bother to comprehensively learn to converse in French (she sporadically attends language classes and is just unbelievably terrible at the accent, which, honestly, is something you do start to pick up after you hear it regularly), but everyone at her office inexplicably just switches to English around her. Frankly, this show forcing the beautiful and perfect Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, who plays Emily's fabulous French boss Sylvie Grateau, to speak in the English language all the time instead of her stunning native French is a crime that should potentially be brought before a council at the Hague.

Emily never learns French, never starts taking public transportation, and spends all of her time insisting — at work and in personal matters — that her pushy American way is best, particularly in the way that's always prioritizing work over leisure. (It is, point in fact, illegal to send work emails on weekends in France, which gives you some idea of the preferred balance there.) Emily is, to be borderline polite, a buffoon who stomps her way through the French capital in impractical shoes who has zero respect for the country's culture and way of life.

Also, how in the world is Emily allowed to not only live in Paris after leaving her original firm — does she have a visa?! — and why is she allowed to keep that canonically inaccurate chambre de bonne? This show has never depicted Emily crying outside the prefecture after an absurd bureaucratic issue with her carte de séjour, and that alone makes it a total failure. 

There's a stereotype that French people are rude, and "Emily in Paris" leans into that to a degree that's frankly pretty offensive. This isn't the show's first brush with cultural insensitivity (its creatives were forced to apologize after bizarrely depicting its sole Ukranian character as a wanton shoplifter in the midst of the crisis between Russia and Ukraine) but the way it represents France is genuinely ludicrous. First of all, let me stick up for the typical Parisian. Americans are usually rude without realizing it; when you walk into a business in France, it's considered polite to say hello, which is not an American custom. If they're testy in response to someone walking into their store and ignoring them, that honestly makes sense!

Even the stereotypes the show gets "right" are somehow completely wrong. Yes, Parisians smoke a lot; I can confirm that myself. What they don't do is skip meals and have a cigarette instead, yet when Emily asks Sylvie to get lunch with her in one episode, Sylvie demurs, saying she already had a smoke. Long lunches with plenty of wine are a big part of the French lifestyle, and a woman like Sylvie would remain petite despite plenty of bread and butter because walking is also a major part of life in Paris. 

People love joking about this show when I blather about living in Paris, which inevitably leads to me going on a rant. Here it is in written form, I guess. "Emily in Paris" isn't just a bad television show, it's also a dreadful representation of life in France, which is wonderful, infuriating, and an experience for which I'll always be grateful. Rebuild the Bastille and lock Emily up, s'il vous plait.