Emily in Paris and the Importance of Bad Media

 Emily in Paris is terrible. It is a shallow, vapid, inconsistent, unrealistic, and immature nightmare. The setting doesn't represent it's real life inspiration. The professional life portrayed comes from the imagination of a teenaged girl in the late 90s. It's impossible to decide who the worst character is. Is it Emily, with her entitlement and immaturity? Is it that French girl who pretends to be pregnant to stay with a man she clearly doesn't even love? Is it Sylvie, with her constant 'sexy French woman' affectations? I mean, I know peeople praise Sylvie for being some kind of feminist icon, but a woman like that with drive me mad with her eyebrow raises, eye-rolls and sultry intonation. And the men? I can't think of anything to say about the men except that they have handsome heads. That's it. That's all I can say.

As it turns out, pretty much everyone agrees with me. I haven't heard of a single person admit to actually liking Emily in Paris. Not one. Quite surprisingly, though, therein lies it's strength. Emily in Paris is uneqovically bad. In today's age of endless content production, that makes it immeasurably more valueable from it's competition. 

In case you don't know, I often have to do busywork. Some light television is my companion in this. It's led me to browse a lot of streaming content over the last four years or so, and I am honestly frustrated with the amount of content that is 'good enough'. It's not bad, but it's completely unremarkable. There is very little to complain about but nothing to praise. Any post-show conversations are likely to be short and boring. Sure, When They See Us is a masterpiece, Derry Girls' heart beats off the screen, and the Menendez Brothers documentary could contribute to the overturning of a controversial 30-year-old conviction. But then there's the Virgin Rivers and Never Have I Evers. Both of these examples have a high viewership and decent reviews, certainly better than Emily in Paris, but somehow neither are moving enough to spark any discourse.

Emily in Paris, in all it's awfulness, is moving. It moves one to anger and irritation. On social media, that's a bad thing. But is it so bad when it comes to artistic content? Just last month, I made an observation about Emily in Paris that I hadn't heard anyone make so far: the older generation seems far more hippie in it's attitudes towards all aspects of romantic love, while the younger generation can seem anachronistically 1950s in their fixation with the dating to nuclear family pipeline. I started to think about the observations others have made about the show, related to it's class-blindedness, the urban planning of Paris, the housing issues in European cities, even the atrocious fashion. I am not kidding about the fashion. There's a lady on Youtube who went so far as to critique the shoes Emily wears. She somehow connects it to the cobblestone streets of Paris and how heels are impractical for such surfaces, and I have to admit I got some good tips about her video about how to dress like a real urban professional woman. 

It seems to me that Emily in Paris is that one show that is so earnestly bad that you could criticize it for four years straight and never run out of things to talk about. It remains bad even after the showmakers take the audience critique and make Emily speak some French in recent seasons. For people like me who lurk in the video essay corners of Youtube, Emily in Paris had become a class of sorts. It's a class where you learn nothing from the course material but quite a lot from the criticism. At this point, it's become a cultural unifier of sorts in terms of how unified people are in their reception of the show, and just as unified in contributing to the criticism. It's now the tool using which people are criticizing works previously praised for being progressive (Sex and the City, Gossip Girl) and praising works that seem to have stood the test of time (The Devil Wears Prada). People are citing Emily in Paris to teach young girls how to have realistic expectations with their career or navigating workplace interactions. They are comparing the social status of Emily and her friend Mindy, and discussing how class can affect interpersonal relationships. People are commenting on how the show makes Paris look beautiful in spite of the ugliness of contemporary Paris. (Nobody is talking about the men. Nobody. There is nothing to talk about there). It's gone far enough that Macron is now promising to keep Emily in Paris, if only for the cultural capital it is bringing France. That really happened last week!

This situation has made me think that bad media is important, or at least more important than the good enough media I described before. Not everyone is the French New Wave-type. Like it or not, a lot of people do enjoy the quirky escapism of shows like Emily in Paris, and while the show does nothing to dig deeper into it's problems, the response it has generated is inviting the Emily in Paris watchers to deeper discourse. It doesn't look like an intellectual effort from the outside, but maybe that's exactly the point of bad media.