On Friday, Netflix dropped the premiere season of Emily in Paris, a 10-episode romantic comedy series about an American marketing and social media coordinator whose job sends her abroad. The show is a breezy, sexy, silly delight, but it's also the latest TV show to demonstrate absolutely zero understanding of how people use social media. It's hilarious — and completely insane.
The posts
To borrow a burn from the show's own Pierre Cadault (Jean-Christophe Bouvet), Emily's posts are trés ringarde — basic af. The travel selfies are very much how one would use a small personal social media account — but again, from the outset we're told that Emily is not casual user but someone so versed in this field that she's been given this responsibility at work.
But she is a casual user. In the first episode she has 48 followers, which is a pretty reliable tell that she just made her account yesterday. And what account is that, exactly? It's hard to tell which app because it resembles none of the most popular ones — it looks more like a messaging app than anything, especially when Emily's caption appears typed out on screen in a text bubble.
Oh yeah, about that — she types these captions on the spot and just fires them off into the social internet, which any social media advisor and influencer will tell you is nothing short of chaotic. There are rules about these things, or at least guidelines! There are optimal times of day to post and things to tag and locations to check in at and for the love of God, woman, use a single hashtag! Of course it's not impossible to gain followers without all those things, but it's not easy and it's certainly not overnight. Suggesting that Emily's follower growth is completely organic is perhaps the most wild fantasy this show gives us.
The confusion
From the moment Emily arrives in Paris, her knowledge, use, and even acknowledgement of social media sends her French colleagues into a frenzy. What are these newfangled American ways! The way her boss says "your Instagram" (oh yeah, apparently it's Instagram), every syllable dripping with disdain, is bizarre on its own, and downright laughable coming from the head of a marketing firm. It's like when everyone on The Bold Type reacted to "the dot com" like they were your grandpa creating a Facebook and not millennials at a media company in the 2010s. Emily's whole job is to create and increase social media engagement, and whenever she does anything close to that everyone around her is ready to call the embassy and deport her ass.
The cybersex
This is only tangentially related to social media, but the brief and mortifying video chat sex scene between Emily and her boyfriend in episode 1 is so woefully out of touch with our current reality that it made me pout and say "Aw, honey" out loud. Bad WiFi interrupting sexy time is not as funny and innovative as TV writers think! We don't actually know anything about Emily and her boyfriend's sexual relationship but based on Em's "golly gee" delivery of "Are we having cybersex" things are pretty vanilla (Paris may change that).
Even pre-quarantine, cybersex was nothing new — in fact the term itself feels a little dusty. What is with Netflix and heroines who know nothing about dating and relationships in the modern era? Do y'all think people are using dating apps just to get married? Or that people in long-distance relationships simply turn off their sex drive and lull themselves to sleep every night with the memories of kisses past? Aw, honey.
The growth
Once in Paris, Emily experiences an inexplicable yet meteoric rise in her Instagram following (despite it being Instagram, she somehow gets retweeted in one episode. Sure!). There's no apparent reason for the sudden fame — she is, quite frankly, a ringarde American doing ringarde American things and being rewarded for it with social media clout, attention at work, and lots of cute French men! How did this happen? We literally never find out.
The quality
Once Emily's following balloons the way it does, her Instagram usage...remains the same. The amount of attention I’ve seen unpaid aspiring influencers put into their social media strategy and content is roughly 8293879x times what Emily puts into hers. She continues to thrive on bad selfies (truly how are they so bad. Girl learn your angles!) with no regard for hashtags, composition, or aesthetics. Don't tell me she's an influencer who never asks people to take her photo, never asks for it to be taken again and again while meticulously backseat-directing it and throwing in a fake laugh or spontaneous hair touch because that shit works. I don't buy it!
Anyway in conclusion the only TV show ever to understand a damn thing about social media is American Vandal and that's that. Is Emily in Paris a riotous farce of the millennial American woman and her relationship with her phone? Absolutely. Did we watch it in a day and have a wonderful time? Also yes.
Emily in Paris is now streaming on Netflix.
Related Video: What to binge on the best 30-day free trials
Topics Instagram Netflix Social Media
