I’m an expat living in France – this is everything ‘Emily in Paris’ gets wrong

Four years ago, Emily Cooper bounded onto our screens, full of faux pas, Americanisms, and an excessive wardrobe poached straight from The Hunger Games’ Capitol. I watched it from Cornwall under lockdown, likely still clad in my sweaty gym kit, with a sense of nostalgia for my own gaffs and holiday romances during my student year abroad in France.

Emily’s initial move to Paris comes as a surprise, when she steps in to replace her pregnant boss. My own move was no less surprising, although far more tragic, and it was my father’s death that triggered the life upheaval. Since I’m more comfortable spending the day in my gym kit than a Beetlejuice catsuit, I opted for Lyon over Paris. As Emily in Paris prepares to wrap up her fourth season in France, I’m just beginning my fourth year here. While the show has lost none of its enjoyability, I’m not too sure what expat world Emily is living in.

Oddly enough, Emily’s work life at Savoir, chockful of office drama, is where I see the most accurate representation of French life. It’s not for the catty comments – to my knowledge, no-one has ever called me ‘la plouc’ (country bumpkin) – nor for the mingling of business and pleasure, but for the work hours. I work in a co-working space, but even here, long lunch breaks (often at a restaurant) are an institution. An expat friend who works a “normal” job arrives at work at 8.30am each day, only to spend the first hour of the day alone, just like the over-keen Emily. Like Emily, she’s arrived at the office before to find the lights off and the doors still locked.

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This is a show that has always served up eye candy. At the start of season four, Emily tells her best friend Mindy, who’s in the shower (though, unbeknownst to Emily, she’s actually speaking to her love interest, Gabriel, who’s popped around the use the shower): “I saw hot men everywhere.”

I remember thinking the same when I moved to Lyon from Cornwall, my eyes on stalks as I was confronted with the selection. Are French men really sexier, or was I just flitting from a very small pool in lockdown to a much larger, more open one? Open in all senses of the word, it seems, as Emily’s love life is entangled with love triangles, cheating and a general fluidity of relationships. But while I know many people in France that have cheated or been cheated on, that have dabbled with non-monogamy or polyamorous or throuple relationships, I can think of a fair few examples in my social circle in the UK, too.

Emily in Paris perpetuates an unflattering stereotype that native English speakers cannot, or will not, learn French. It’s only half true. In spite of their claims otherwise, I find that the average French person speaks more English than if you reversed the scenario, probably from having it thrust upon them through popular culture. But in many of the mixed nationality relationships I know, my own included, French is the de facto. That being said, I do know some anglophones who, à la Emily, have spent years in France and still struggle to order a coffee.

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If there’s one area in which Emily’s French experience is wholly unrealistic, though, it’s her lifestyle. The average salary for someone working in marketing in Paris is €40,000 (£33,772) – not to be sneezed at, but certainly not enough to afford Emily’s apartment. A one-bedroom furnished flat in Paris’s 5th arrondissement, where Emily lives, costs on average €1,756 (£1,483) a month, over half her monthly salary. That’s without factoring in her extremely generous clothes budget, always assuming she doesn’t source everything from French charity shops. On Emily’s salary, she’d more likely be living outside the ring road, or in a four-person house share.

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Emily has managed to make very few friends (with whom she’s not romantically embroiled), and her only true friend is fellow expat Mindy Chen. Do expats bandy together? Honestly, yes, at least at first. When I first moved, fellow outsiders were my safety blanket. They were also less likely to be rigid in their friendship groups, and therefore had more time to socialise. Unlike Emily, though, I haven’t found myself stuck there. My office is largely francophone, and since many of my friends moved to France to be with a French partner, my friendship circles are a mixture of French and internationals.

There are moments of lucidity, in particular Emily’s struggles to obtain a work visa in season three – although it’s a shame we can’t all get our paperwork sped up by being retweeted by Brigitte Macron. Instead of buying ever more ridiculous headgear, though, perhaps Emily should invest in some better French classes.

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