I Was A US Expat Living In France. Here's What Netflix's Emily In Paris Gets Wrong

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 Light in all of 2020: The premiere of Darren Star's Netflix series "Emily in Paris" on October 2.

In all seriousness, even though my timing was legitimately terrible — Paris shut down entirely in mid-March 2020, leaving expats 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. 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. 

Great fashion aside, "Emily in Paris" has serious problems from the first episode onward, and the first accuracy issue is Emily's (Lily Collins) lodgings. An attic apartment in Paris, to oversimplify 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 corners. There are a few issues here: First off, Emily's apartment is provided by her workplace (which probably would upgrade her from a chambre de bonne), and second, her apartment is not a chambre de bonne at all. It's a way-too-big luxury place with its own bathroom, that just happens to be on the top floor.

These cracks in reality only seep further as the show continues. For example, how is Emily allowed to continue living in Paris after leaving her original firm? Does she even have a visa? This show never depicts Emily crying outside the prefecture after an absurd bureaucratic issue with her carte de séjour. That alone is a total failure.

Then there's the matter 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.

Even if you overlook these technical details, though, the actual Parisians in "Emily in Paris" also miss the mark. There's a stereotype that French people are rude, and "Emily in Paris" leans into that to a degree that's frankly offensive. 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! The Parisians in "Emily in Paris," though, are pointessly hostile to Emily in the most cliché manner possible.

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 (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) 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. A woman like Sylvie would remain petite despite plenty of bread and butter because walking is also a major part of life in Paris. 

This isn't the show's only brush with cultural insensitivity (its creatives were forced to apologize after bizarrely depicting its sole Ukrainian character as a wanton shoplifter in the midst of the crisis between Russia and Ukraine) but the ludicrous way it represents the French people runs through every single episode. 

Growing pains are normal when you move to any new city, particularly when you're not fluent in the language. I went through this myself. It's not like I expected the titular Emily to speak perfect French immediately upon her arrival in Paris. As "Emily in Paris" continues, though, you might think she would learn some French and attempt to assimilate. You would be wrong. Emily never bothers 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 just naturally start to pick up after you hear it regularly), but everyone at her office inexplicably switches to English around her. 

So, where does this leave us? Emily never learns French, never takes public transportation, and spends all of her time insisting — at work and in personal matters — that her pushy American way is best, particularly in regard to always prioritizing work over leisure (it is, in fact, illegal to send work emails on weekends in France). It'd be easy to say that Emily is a buffoon who stomps her way through the French capital with zero respect for the country's culture and way of life, but then again, the Paris in this show is pretty far from the real Paris. 

People love joking about this show when I blather about living in Paris, but "Emily in Paris" isn't just a bad television show, it's also a dreadful representation of life in France. There are so many worthwhile TV shows that Netflix has canceled, but this one somehow keeps trudging on like Emily in her impractical shoes, and it's a bitter shame. Rebuild the Bastille and lock Emily up, s'il vous plait.