Great news! I am the one millionth person to have a take on Emily in Paris, Netflix’s new-ish TV show about a young woman from Chicago who says “Chicago!” a lot and moves to Paris for work.
It’s a formulaic fish out of water story, and everyone on God’s green earth has watched it. It’s taking over our imaginations:
And everyone resents Emily, and the show, for not being more interesting:
But Emily is not an antihero. The show encourages you to identify with her in every frame. You get information when she does, usually, and she’s the only character you get to regularly be alone with, which means she’s the only character you see feel lonely, which basically engineers affinity. Even when she’s acting like an entitled American asshole — or wearing a series of bucket hats, so many bucket hats one character calls her Bucket Hat instead of Emily — you, the viewer, sort of root for her by default.
This isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s interesting, because Emily is a social media marketer. When you root for her, you’re rooting for her to market luxury goods on Insta. She is usually marketing to young, basic American women with bag charms — people like her and, presumably, like the show’s target audience.
So as a viewer, you’re kind of rooting for Emily to market expensive stuff to a parallel universe version of you. Or just to you, directly.
She does a bit of both. Emily works on several campaigns in the show, which is a series of episodes and also a series of intro-level marketing case studies. Some of the products she works on are fictional — like De L’Heure perfume — but some are real — like Hästens mattresses, which I hadn’t even heard of before the show, but apparently they’re Swedish, cost up to $60k and are full of artisanal horse hair. In fact, Hästens may have paid for placement on Emily in Paris.
This is not a particularly hot Twitter topic (the one like on this tweet is from ME), but it should be!
It’s weird. I’ve seen a lot of people agitated about Emily in Paris — what a clueless American abroad Emily is, how bad she is at using social media, etc. — but I haven’t seen anyone talking about the way the show encourages marketees to empathize with and root for marketers. Who are somewhat literally marketing to them.
This isn’t Satanic, but it’s faintly unsettling. There’s a natural tension between marketers and the people they’re marketing to. Most (good) marketers don’t want you to buy a product you’ll hate, or trick you, but they’re more tightly allied to the brand they’re working for than they are to you personally. Their interests are not exactly your interests.
Emily in Paris is all about erasing this tension, though, and it’s working!
I think it’s working because Emily’s a social media marketer.
At least in the States, social media ads are powerful. Instagram ads’ UX has been praised extensively in The Atlantic; Gucci has a TikTok. Any major brand that claims to be “too good” for social media is elitist to the point of hating money.
But in the show, social media is controversial. Emily spends much of her time convincing snobby, traditional French people that it’s a good idea to have active brand social accounts. By presenting this as controversial (which it probably isn’t IRL), Emily in Paris makes the viewer feel that they possess intuitive, valuable marketing insights.
Marketers — you’re just like them!
The show narrows the gap between viewers and marketers from the other direction, too, by erasing all the ways social media marketing is different from just using social media as a person. Brands get extra features and metrics on social that normal people don’t; there’s also tons of software meant to help brands schedule and manage their posts across various accounts. Hootsuite! Sprout Social! But you’d never guess that from Emily in Paris.
Marketers… they’re just like you!
Social media marketers have been complaining all over Twitter about this. I thought this thread, in particular, was really satisfying; as an agency employee, Emily would never be allowed to post candid pics to high-profile clients accounts on a whim! Higher-ups at her agency would have to sign off on those posts.
But her unrealistic ability to improvise at work makes her work seem authentic, or expressive. The images Emily posts to brand accounts aren’t so different from what she posts on her personal Insta; both arise organically in her fun, chaotic life. Both get posted spontaneously.
Brand accounts… they’re just like yours!
This^ seems to be the show’s overall viewpoint — that everyone’s a marketer, brands are people, people are brands — and it’s a bold stance Trojan-horsed inside a bland show. It’s very different from the viewpoint of Mad Men, which, while also about marketing, had a more ambiguous perspective on the industry. Are these people truly “successful”? Are they doing good in the world?
Emily in Paris has no such ambiguity, anywhere. Emily, as played by Lily Collins, feels one emotion at a time, like a human emoji; about her job, she feels unwavering excitement.
(“I enjoy work and accomplishment,” she says, when a French coworker gives her a don’t-live-to-work-work-to-live pep talk. “It makes me happy.”)
Which makes Emily in Paris the first TV show I’ve seen that tried to convince me modern, enthusiastic marketers are just like me, that our interests are shared and conflict only with… French interests. Influencers and “it me” walked so Emily in Paris could run. It collapses marketers, parasocial relationships and protagonists together, and if I want a satisfying narrative arc for my #1 relatable BFF marketer Emily, then I should go out and buy the special Swedish horsehair mattress. Right? I mean, I owe it to Emily.
I owe it to myself.
I owe it to us!!!