Lily Collins and Ashley Park return in the eagerly awaited new season of , dropping today, August 15. Picking up from where season 3 ended, Emily Cooper (Collins) has chosen to stay in Paris, leaving Chicago behind. This season is set to unravel a whirlwind of love triangles, surprise pregnancies, and other juicy drama.
However, critics aren’t as excited, finding the new twists rather dull despite the show's signature fashion-forward flair. Curious if this season is worth the watch? Read on to find out what went awry in part four! . No matter what's going on in Emily's life, her ensembles are always on point.
How she manages that wardrobe in her miniscule Paris apartment and her salary is anyone's guess. But this series is hardly about keeping it real. While that wasn't really an issue in the first season as the sweet temptations of the series, bang in the middle of a pandemic was hard to resist.
But now by season 4 the effect has surely worn down. While the show still retains its familiar beats, unless Part 2 really redeems itself with an interesting plot to take the story forward, this may as well be the final season. It's not that Emily in Paris is unbearably unwatchable, it's just the series has been going round in the same circle now for far too long.
To get annoyed by TV as blandly pleasant as Emily in Paris does at times feel like kicking a puppy. But don’t we deserve better? As a show, it seems desperate to have more edge, peppering the dialogue with the odd swear word or reference to kink – and yet the height of Emily’s embrace of her own sexuality is a rendezvous with her handsome boyfriend on a roof, something she’ll bring up ad nauseam as a sign that she’s becoming just like these debauched French folk. But her Disney princess approach to romance and unrelenting sweetness feels insidious – the centre of a series that has repackaged feminine empowerment with a pretty bow but is afraid to make its protagonist too messy, too horny or too flawed.
It’s an Instagram filter on top of a Vaseline covered lens which renders its protagonist and its city charmless. It’s a lot, but it’s also sort of trivial, and the show’s breezy “everything’s fine” tone makes it seem doubly so, the more these woefully intertwined people manage to manipulate each other’s lives. Whenever any character is on a high, you know there will be a low by the end of the episode, so what’s the point in enjoying any of it? No one can touch another person on this show without a third person peeking through the crack in the doorway, feeling bad about it .
. The decision to split the series in half makes even less sense for Emily and co than it did for : at least the latter’s writers had the good sense to conclude part one on a cliffhanger. This batch of episodes, by comparison, ends with a Gallic shrug.
Remember being taught to scrunch up your shoulders and sigh “bof” to express general indifference in GCSE French lessons? The end note is basically the TV equivalent of that gesture: a “will this do?” dressed in Carrie Bradshaw’s cast-offs. And while the show’s silliness has a certain limited charm, the cumulative effect is akin to eating too much sugar too quickly: it leaves you feeling a bit queasy and vowing to swear off this stuff in future..
