Season 4 of ‘Emily in Paris’ Remains Delightfully Absurd and Adorable

The Olympics may be over, but the campy Parisian hijinks have only just begun with the arrival of Season 4 of Netflix’s unstoppably silly, occasionally chic Emily in Paris on August 15.

Given Netflix’s recent penchant for splitting its seasons into bits, this is only Part 1 of the new installment, suggesting there’s much more in store for romantically challenged influencer Emily Cooper and her parade of European boyfriends and sassy French coworkers. In the first five episodes of the season, however, not much seems to be happening.

Four seasons in, Emily in Paris is feeling the churn. To be clear, this show, despite its Darren Star pedigree, has never been particularly good. It’s funny, kitschy, and novel, with an aspirational setting and the requisite antics and misunderstandings expected from a half-hour comedy series. But at this point, you’d think our characters would have made it further along in their lives.

It’s not about settling down and starting families, though that is one of this season’s many subplots. It’s more about the fact that barely anything has changed since the first episode of the first season. The characters move around each episode like flat paper dolls being tipped from one end of a page to another. Its “shocks,” such as they are, have become predictable, and its archetypal cast of characters has become frustrating.

Nonetheless, there is a plot to this first half of Season 4, and it’s as entertaining as anything else the show has cooked up.

Emily (Lily Collins) and her banker boyfriend Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) are on a break following the explosive Season 3 finale non-wedding between chef Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) and Camille (Camille Razat). Camille is pregnant by Gabriel and is keeping the baby, though she doesn’t want a relationship with him and ends up disappearing for the first few episodes while she sorts her feelings out.

Emily and Gabriel remain flirty, but Emily is determined not to fall into that trap again. Emily and Alfie, on the other hand, are equally shocked to discover that they’re the new faces of Grateau’s latest marketing campaign, and their nonexistent relationship has been plastered on billboards all over the city. Emily’s bestie Mindy (Ashley Park) has entered the Eurovision Song Contest, and despite her wealthy boyfriend, she’s struggling to scrounge up the cash to pay for the necessary pyrotechnics.

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, the less impactful it feels. Whenever a 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 series’ only goal seems to be to keep doing whatever remains interesting, and it seemingly believes that the only interesting thing is to keep mixing up the love quadrangle between Emily, her bore of a boyfriend, her chef soulmate, and the chef’s mopey ex. Even occasional appearances from the enfant terrible couture designer played by Jeremy O. Harris lend the show merely a tiny spark of excitement.

The only truly compelling thread this season, so far, follows Emily’s boss Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), who is juggling her former flame, the famous perfumer Antoine (William Abadie), and the demanding owner of a luxury fashion conglomerate whose behavior may be a tad problematic. Her scenes feel like they’re part of a different, more mature show for actual adults—one that makes the rest of Emily in Paris look like children’s entertainment.

Really, the best reason to keep watching is to see all the nutty outfits Lily Collins is saddled with this time around. This season does have its standouts, including an incredible royal-blue suit and a black-and-white candy-striped masquerade number paired with a giant hat.

I don’t pretend to know anything about fashion, and I certainly won’t learn anything from this particular show, but it’s always fun to see the wardrobe department going full-out on something like this while other shows dress their cast in a sea of crewnecks and black trousers. Emily in Paris has never fit into any sort of streaming TV mold, and I only wish its writing had the same daring sensibility.