S ome personal news: I have decided to drop my beef with Emily in Paris (Netflix, from 15 August) which I had always assumed was originally made as soft-edged recuperative videos to help brain injury survivors relearn how to watch TV again, but is actually one of the most anticipated cultural forces on the planet. The pitch of the show, in case you misread the title, is an American girl called Emily (the titular “Emily”) who goes to live “in Paris” (a city in France – which is in Europe), and there she refuses to ever learn French. She does, however, gasp a lot, and wear extravagantly fashionable outfits, and enter into an extraordinarily unlikely love triangle with a good-looking French man who can’t act and a good-looking Englishman who can’t act.
Her friend, a good-looking American who can’t act, is always singing, for some reason. Her boss is mean :-( Again, I am dropping my beef. When the first series of the show came out I just thought: ‘Well it’s fine, isn’t it.
It’s just a bit of pablum. You can’t get mad at pablum, can you?’ Series two dropped, however, and people seemed to actually be taking it seriously. They were making sweeping cultural statements about the French based on what they had learned from watching Phil Collins’s daughter interact with them.
They were earnestly trying to anticipate the swerves the story would take. (I’ll give you a clue: she’s going to end up with one of the two men she’s been falling over in front of.