Season five of Netflix’s beloved eye candy has arrived, and it is truly time for people — and by people I mean me — to stop questioning the very existence of Emily in Paris — actually in Rome — but back in Paris, which premiered Thursday on Netflix. There comes a moment when one must stop arguing with reality and start accepting it without rage, and season five feels like an excellent time for reconciliation. Especially since Emily, that eyebrow-heavy creature roaming Europe and tormenting locals with a horrifying accent, does something this season that might, in foreign terms, be called growing up.
Do not worry. She does not abandon her defining traits. She still churns out campaign ideas as if she were Don Draper on a trip, men continue to fall at her feet and the cards are dealt in her favor in 99% of cases. But I am willing to swear that season five Emily is a little more human, and at times even endearingly ridiculous. Or perhaps it is simply her excellent decision to ditch the bangs in favor of a bob that makes her seem slightly more put together.
Calling it “maturity” in the context of Emily is nearly an oxymoron, because her entire essence lies in never changing, which is exactly what most viewers count on. She and her supporting cast — her colleagues at the Agence Grateau, her best friend Mindy and her rotating lovers Marcello, Gabriel and Alfie — remain largely stuck in place. So even when creator Darren Star decides that for the sake of freshness they will spend part of the season somewhere else — Rome — they (spoiler alert) return to Paris midway through and behave exactly the same. This is how Emily in Paris transforms itself from a repetitive cliché into a cliché that functions as a stable anchor in chaotic lives, something you can rely on.
Narratively, the season does feel slightly more tolerable. Emily (Lily Collins) follows Marcello to Italy, where the queen Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) obliges the writers and decides to open a Grateau branch in the capital. Emily does what she does best: pounding uneven sidewalks, getting attacked by buses and documenting it all on her Instagram account, which, we are told this season, has already surpassed 200,000 followers. Along the way, she offers another lesson in marketing and branding — repackaging baby perfume as a chic fragrance and suggesting that luxury brand Fendi sell a real defective bag that looks like a fake. Branding, we learn once again, is everything, and that applies to the girl herself.
But the need for change apparently became impossible to suppress, and in that sense, Rome was a genuine lifeline. Emily gets to wallow in stereotypical Italian clichés, pose in locations too beautiful to be real — clean, quiet and postcard-perfect — and teach the clueless locals how to post on Instagram. Her romance with Marcello blossoms, but at some point Cupid chokes on pasta and paradise falters. Emily and her Italian stud fight over something silly, Sylvie and her lover clash over something substantive and everyone boards a plane back to Paris. Rome was only a rebound, and Emily’s real guy — the sweet, puppy-eyed Michelin-star chef Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) — is waiting for her.
In his wisdom, Star makes a bit more room for Emily’s groomsmen and bridesmaids. Sylvie, as usual, gets the adult storylines and settles comfortably into the beloved “Samantha from Sex and the City” niche — fiercely sensual, sharp in business and weak for her husband. Mindy (the perfect Ashley Park) and Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) tumble into a dizzying hookup that stretches on. Mindy and Emily’s relationship levels up into an ode to brave female friendship that still does not quite pass the Bechdel test. Around all of this swirl additional incidents, as per Emily tradition, which are resolved through some blind stroke of luck and keep the 10 episodes moving along.
The season finale hints that Star may be planning to eliminate the very reason Emily came to the city in the first place, but it is safe to assume Netflix will not rush to part with a profitable brand. Emily does seem more grown-up. She understands where she belongs and where she does not. She sees Gabriel as a good friend rather than a readily available lover. She wonders whether the thrilling, exciting days of her Paris life are behind her, and you can almost hear her saying that now it is all “fights, work, poop and pee.” Yet within all of this, she is still Emily — a brochure for tourists living in the real world who take a vacation inside their heads when they turn on the TV.
And maybe it is we who have grown up, finally ready to accept her existence as she is: our boarding pass to worlds that soothe the senses, at least until the low-cost flights return.