Emily in Paris season 4 part 1 review: Low-stakes fluff that ends with a Gallic shrug

Four years on from the lockdown debut of Emily in Paris, you may already have strong feelings about the Netflix show. Is the drama, in which Lily Collins plays a wide-eyed American transplanted to the French capital to wear mad outfits and instruct her colleagues in the art of #socialmedia, enjoyably low-stakes fluff that knowingly winks at its own silliness? Or is it the epitome of everything that’s wrong with streaming-era TV: pretty, plotless “content” designed to be watched with one eye on your phone screen and your mind elsewhere?

Whichever camp you fall into, you will find very little to change your mind in the first half of the show’s fourth season. Just like Bridgerton, another Netflix show that seems to follow the “no plot, just vibes” school of television making, the 10-episode run has been divided into two instalments of five. As ever, Emily’s sanitised, heavily filtered version of Paris makes Richard Curtis’s London look gritty – no one would ever get sick after swimming in this parallel universe Seine.

This time, our heroine is facing further social media notoriety after a TikTok explaining her complicated love life goes viral. Hey, it’s slightly more feasible than when she became an in-demand influencer in season one after posting a few naff photos of pain au chocolat on her Instagram account. As a character, Emily feels a little like she has been genetically engineered in a lab, grown from the quirky-adorable DNA of previous romcom heroines, so it’s only right that she has a pair of cardboard cut-out love interests vying for her heart.

The contenders? There’s Gabriel (Lucas Bravo), the handsome chef who conveniently happens to live in the flat downstairs, but less conveniently has a pregnant ex-fiancée named Camille (Camille Razat). And then there’s fellow ex-pat Alfie (Lucien Laviscount), the handsome British finance fella (he’s very much a fella – I kept expecting him to greet Emily by shouting “Oi oi!”). He now works for one of our protagonist’s clients, so that he can plausibly bump into her at inopportune occasions and prompt Collins’s hyper-expressive eyebrows to whizz upwards.

Beyond this central romantic conundrum of Gabriel versus Alfie, sub-plots are introduced, partially resolved then discarded with head-spinning frequency. Emily must kiss her ex at a tennis match to fulfil a contractual obligation to one of her brands! Her imposing boss Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, whose icy appeal is the best thing about the show by miles) turns #MeToo whistleblower to expose wrongdoing at a fashion house! Gabriel really, really wants his bistro to get a Michelin star! Emily’s best friend Mindy is – checks notes – doing Eurovision?

Coupled with the visual onslaught of Emily’s outfits, this scattergun effect is exhausting. And on the note of those outfits, surely no contemporary twentysomething has ever owned such an egregious collection of massive hats, one of which threatens to engulf Collins completely during a masquerade ball. The plot stakes are always kitten-heel low, too. When one character briefly disappears, any dash of intrigue is quickly stamped out when Emily remembers that she in fact can track said character’s location through the Find My Friends-style app on her phone.

The decision to split the series in half makes even less sense for Emily and co than it did for Bridgerton: at least the latter’s writers had the good sense to conclude part one on a cliffhanger. This batch of episodes, by comparison, ends with a Gallic shrug. Remember being taught to scrunch up your shoulders and sigh “bof” to express general indifference in GCSE French lessons? The end note is basically the TV equivalent of that gesture: a “will this do?” dressed in Carrie Bradshaw’s cast-offs. And while the show’s silliness has a certain limited charm, the cumulative effect is akin to eating too much sugar too quickly: it leaves you feeling a bit queasy and vowing to swear off this stuff in future.