Emily in France 🇫🇷 No, I'm Not Gonna Rag on Emily in Paris
This Emily has some words for that one.
In the past week, I've had a lot of friends, acquaintances, and more reach out asking me some version of the same question: How do you feel about Emily in Paris?
If you didn't know, the aforementioned is a new Netflix show from the creators of Sex and the City, promising to be a younger, trans-Atlantic version of what Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte were for NYC.
My answer is a complicated one and has much to do with the fact that 1) I'm very snarky and don't like very many things anyway; 2) I'm not a fan of television in general;Â and 3) So far, I've only watched one episode.
But I will say this: I'm having a lot of fun looking at all of the memes created in response to it.
Look, I get that this show is just a bit of fun. In all honesty, if people hadn't been so mean to it, I might have given my own two cents. But the reality is this: while Emily is a bit more starry-eyed than a lot of people who move here, there is that element of transplanting yourself to Paris, at first, where everything seems like a dream. Maybe that's helpful to U.S. viewers now, who can't get here. But I have always thought it would be even more fun to have a show about the reality of moving to Paris, once the stardust wears off: of navigating the caverns of bureaucracy; of your native tongue getting worse before your French gets better; of trying to befriend the locals and failing, not because they're cruel, but because you lack shared cultural understandings.
Maybe I'll watch the rest. But I'd also love to write a version of this show that includes all sides of Paris: diverse, frustrating, bureaucratic, chauvinistic, revolutionary... and yes, a little bit magical.
What I'm Writing
1. Since Emily's in Paris, I'll take you to Alsace! I took photos of the gorgeous countryside on a trip there this spring and posted them on the blog.
2. I couldn't resist trying the local cuisine. Binchstub's modern flammekueche and Botaniste's all-natural local menu both won me over.
3. Samantha Irby's We Are Never Meeting in Real Life had me laughing out loud (to myself) all day in Cannes this summer. More on the blog.
What I'm Reading
1. My hometown of New York has a resilience the likes of which you won't find elsewhere, in the New York Times.
2. One woman reflects on the three men who raised her, in the New Yorker.
3. "I've had enough news now, thank you," an essay we can all relate to, in the Washington Post.
A bientôt !