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‘Turn off your brain and jump!” So says London geezer Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) to ex-girlfriend Emily’s best pal Mindy (Ashley Park), as they flirt their way through a racy dance scene. It could, of course, be an instruction to viewers of season five of Emily in Paris, too. Once pilloried for its Anglophile tendencies and surface-level commitment to la culture française, the fluffy dramedy about an American in Paris helmed by Lily Collins has – over the past five years – become one of TV’s greatest guilty pleasures: a fancy fever dream of great clothes, strapping love interests and a constant karaoke soundtrack courtesy of Park, a Broadway star whose contract clearly dictates that she sing at least five times per episode. The clothes are less outlandish this time around, but still aspirational – lending the show a strand of Sex and the City DNA (they also share a creator, Darren Star).
But, unlike SATC – whose spinoff And Just Like That devolved into a mindless mess – Emily in Paris is free of any baggage, and at liberty to be as silly as it fancies. Much of season five doesn’t even take place in Paris, as our leading lady continues to mix business and pleasure in Rome with cashmere heir Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini). “Ciao and ni hao!” says Mindy, who has rejected a job as a judge on Chinese Popstar (“I’d rather be judging people in real life than on TV”) and is now headed to Italy, just in time to help Emily and her crack marketing team with some #sponsoredcontent (read: singing inside a giant martini glass). Also in town is Alfie: cue an inadvisable fling between the two that instantly breaks all the rules of girl code.
Michelin-starred chef Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) is back, too, and you won’t need much French to understand his instant regret in following Emily to Rome: “Je pense que c’était une très, très mauvaise idée.” Not that she even knows that he’s there: she’s too busy truffle-hunting in deeply impractical heels, while Marcello’s sisters make snide remarks about her in Italian. At least Emily’s still a force to be reckoned with in the marketing world. At one point, she has the incredible idea of rubbing hamburger meat all over her hands to attract the attention of a dog, whose owner, in turn, is a high-powered fashion designer. Brava!
There are many, many new faces, the best among them being Minnie Driver as a spacey socialite, Princess Jane, who knows everybody “from Fiat to Fendi”. She is sure she can bag Agence Grateau’s Rome office some high-profile clients (for a fee). Driver laps up the campiness of the whole thing, savouring lines like, “You picked the right city for an affair … have fun on Saturday night, confess Sunday!” Her character also serves an important purpose in Emily’s fourth-wall-shattering world: as we learn of her financial woes, she becomes the conduit for a plethora of product placement, including – but not limited to – delivering a Peroni commercial at a party.
There is also – perhaps surprisingly – more emotional heft to this series than previous outings, and the sense that Emily and friends are growing up. Collins became a mother in real life earlier this year, and while Emily isn’t thinking about children, there’s definitely more maturity to the character, who looks back wistfully on her early days in Paris (her “belle époque”, she says); takes offence at a work pitch poking fun at her many exes; and wonders what the future holds for her medium-distance relationship. There’s also a (slightly strained) extended metaphor about a fake handbag, and how real things with Marcello truly are. Emily’s boss and nouvelle vague-ish heroine Sylvie (the ever-excellent Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) reconnects with some new men and with an old friend, while Emily considers – perhaps for the first time – that she and Mindy might not be BFFs any more.
Before things can get too heavy, though, the series steers us back towards the absurd and the outrageous, including a twist with Sylvie’s new love interest which – predictable as it is – is very fun. Bruno Gouery gets loads of brilliant, waggish lines, too, as Emily’s colleague Luc. I only hoped we’d see more of fellow Agence Grateau confrère Julien (Samuel Arnold), as he masterminds a campaign to rebrand a homophobic water brand.
Still, Emily in Paris (and Rome) remains a total hoot, and the sort of thing you’ll surely want to gorge on over the holidays alongside the mince pies. Go on, then, allez: turn off your brain, and jump right in …
