SSome personal news: I’ve decided to put my beef with Emily in Paris (Netflix, out August 15). I always assumed the show was originally produced as a soft-sung get-well video to help people with brain injuries relearn how to watch TV, but it’s actually one of the most eagerly anticipated cultural forces on the planet.

The plot of the show, in case you misread the title, is about an American girl named Emily (the titular “Emily”) who moves “to Paris.” (a city in France – well, in Europe), and there she refuses to ever learn French. However, she gasps a lot, wears extravagant, fashionable outfits, and gets caught up in an extraordinarily unlikely love triangle with a handsome Frenchman who can’t act and a handsome Englishman who can’t act. Her friend, a handsome American who can’t act, sings all the time for some reason. Her boss is mean 🙁

I’m letting go of my anger. When the first season of the show aired, I just thought, “Well, it’s okay, right? It’s just a bit of mush. You can’t get upset about mush, can you?” However, the second season came out and people actually seemed to take it seriously. They made blanket cultural statements about the French based on what they learned from watching Phil Collins’ daughter interact with them. They seriously tried to anticipate the twists and turns of the story. (I’ll give you a hint: she’ll end up with one of the two men she’s been falling over in front of for the past three seasons. There’s a slim chance she’ll ultimately and heartily decide she’s better off alone, but I wouldn’t bet on it.) It was all a bit too much for me. The third season came out and the show was watched on loop in my house very much against my will. I was constantly walking around the rooms and hearing bits and pieces of it. Her boss was always mad at her (then fire her! She’s useless!), the French accents of the native French actors were kind of unconvincing, the Songsthe set pieces. What an absolutely despicable, stupid show.

But. I’ll. Drop. My Argument With That. The point about Emily in Paris is that it’s not for me—it’s not even particularly for people who sit up straight—and once you get through all that, you can: well, “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word. But you can at least appreciate Emily in Paris for what it is, which is: an outrageously silly, cheesy Technicolor whirlwind of nonsense. Emily went jogging, you know, and she saw a lot of good-looking French people. She goes home and talks to herself very quickly in the bathroom mirror about all the good-looking French people she saw jogging. Unbeknownst to her, the good-looking Frenchman whose life she has been complicating for no reason for 30 episodes is in the shower and hears all this. He sticks his head behind the shower curtain, she gasps. He says something like – imagine this with a French accent – “Ah, so you’ve seen some handsome French guys, ah?” Later, there’s a party that this guy is inexplicably invited to, despite being their neighbor and something of a chef. Don’t pay too much attention to the glue that holds this all together. This is basically a story told with puppets by a kid whose parents are sobbing at a meeting with an elementary school principal.

But who cares? I’m not going to tell you that Emily in Paris is a good show if you actually watch it (it’s not). Nor am I going to tell you that the show is secretly very clever (although I did notice some very snappy lines of dialogue, almost all of which go to Ashley Park’s Mindy Chen: “I could sell foot pics, but… ugh, it’s demoralizing to do a job you did in high school”).

It’s a show where a bunch of very quirky and very rich characters watch Emily take turns kissing two very expressionless male characters, and there’s also some very beautiful drone shots of Paris in the daytime sun that make you feel like you’re on a bit of a holiday. It’s an employment show for beautiful people who can’t act, and a show where, 30 episodes in and 10 more to come, nothing significant has actually happened. happened. Example: There’s a 33-minute season opener where the entire plotline is “Emily has to go to the tennis tournament and kiss a boy or she’ll lose her job” or something like that. Thinking about it reignites my anger with this show. It’s beneath the dignity of every single person who has ever watched it.