Episode Guide
Episode 1 – | Review Score – 2.5/5 Episode 2 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 3 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 4 – | Review Score – 3.5/5 Episode 5 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 6 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 7 – | Review Score – 2.5/5 Episode 8 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 9 – | Review Score – 3/5 Episode 10 – | Review Score – 2.5/5 Emily In Paris Season 2 is the TV equivalent of turning on a hot tap and watching as lukewarm water dribbles out. You wait patiently hoping it’ll heat up and for the pressure to improve but it never does. The exact same thing can be said for Emily In Paris this year. Season 2 is particularly frustrating to watch because there are glimmers of a good show stuck in the mediocrity; thin pockets of nicely written jokes around a whole desert of underwhelming nothingness. With poor character arcs, half-baked ideas and an inconclusive ending, Emily In Paris is somehow worse than the first season. Now, Emily In Paris has been quite the polarizing show and it’s one of those that you’ll either love or hate. If you’ve made it this far into my review you’ve probably guessed which side of the argument I lie! Season 2 won’t do anything to change the naysayers, but it may actually persuade some that love this show to re-evaluate that after this second season. To its credit though, Emily In Paris does try to rectify some of the mistakes from the past. For a start, the middle swathe of episodes see Emily finally knuckle down and begin learning French. Granted, this is only here to actually meet new love interest Alfie (more on that shortly) but it’s a signal of intent from the creators to address some of the bigger problems from season 1 and it’s great they’ve included that. The first season also ended on a big ol’ cliffhanger and season 2 wastes absolutely no time getting right into the thick of the action. Emily is still working at Savoir and juggling her personal and professional life. That tired and cliched love triangle involving Gabriel and his girlfriend Camille is the big talking point here, made worse by Camille and Emily’s close bond. The first half of the season brings up episodic issues for Savoir (and Emily) to deal with around this, eventually allowing everything to explode in dramatic fashion at the end of episode 3 and the beginning of episode 4. From here though, the series changes tact, adding a new flame in British guy Alfie. The second half of this season then sort of just floats around aimlessly on the River Seine. There’s really not a lot of substance to anything and beyond a half-baked romance with Alfie, there’s not a lot else to sink your teeth into. The drama barely registers, the romance simmers into mediocrity and there are no noteworthy scenes outside of a few creatively designed jokes and sets. In fact, more effort has gone into dressing Emily in as many lavish and drop-dead gorgeous outfits as there has been in writing this screenplay. And boy does it show. The editing in particular here is really sloppy. I mentioned this in some of the recaps but honestly, the scene changes are shocking at times and feels like something out of a low-budget indie flick. Rainy pavements and montages of a soaked Paris in episode 3 are quickly replaced by a cloudless sky and completely dry pavements 2 minutes later. That’s not an exaggeration by the way, it’s literally 2 minutes on the run-time. Another time Emily complains that everything is so hot and the humidity is too much in Paris. As she heads out into the street, everyone around her are wearing long-sleeve shirts, trousers or leggings. It’s these little moments that add up to one irritatingly careless series. Most of the characters also continue to tread into annoying or archetypal stereotypes again, with thin glimmers of characterization soon dashed in favour of shifting the focus back to Emily’s tepid romance with either Gabriel or Camille. The best example of this comes from Luc. There’s a moment early on where Emily heads out to the cinema with Luc that looks to set him up as a more complicated and interesting character this time around. Unfortunately it’s completely thrown out in favour of making more jokes. This extends out to most of the other characters here too, culminating in a frustrating patchwork of loose threads dangling aimlessly without a pretty bow at the end to tie it all together. Ultimately that sums up this second season. There are parts of Emily In Paris that are really solid but other scenes that so wildly miss the mark that it’s hard to know how they even got the green-light in the first place. Emily In Paris Season 2 serves up a sloppy dish of half-baked ideas and disappointing dead-ends that culminate in a messy and inconsistent screenplay. Somehow this is worse than the first season.
