“Emily in Paris 4” has landed in Rome. All roads lead there, right? The path of the protagonist of the most successful glamour series of recent years is unstoppable, despite lukewarm reviews, given the absolute loyalty of the Netflix audience. But this series is not only mediocre in writing, direction and even acting, but it is the symbol of what has been wrong with a certain feminine narrative, superficial, retrograde and materialistic, for too long. A problem that has lasted for decades and of which very little is spoken.

From Paris to Rome, a simply incredible list of stereotypes

“Emily in Paris” already in the first seasons made the French quite angry (to put it mildly), for the simply incalculable quantity of clichés, stereotypes used to give the target audience (the American female one) the postcard image by virtue of which they pack like sardines on planes to go to the French Riviera or to Paris. Things didn’t go any better in the Eternal City. Emily (Lily Collins), having to choose between Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) and Alfie (Lucien Laviscount), does what happens in these cases: she goes to Rome for work and there she meets the charming Roman Marcello Muratori (Eugenio Franceschini). And so off on a Vespa, Colosseum, Trevi, pasta, ice cream, Piazza di Spagna, then towards the non-existent village of Solitano (Ostia Antica but whatever). The guy Marcello (how original) runs like a feudal lord a village of which he is lord and master, by virtue of a factory. Her father was also a good feudal lord: he treated his employees like family, he built schools and hospitals, even though he didn’t pay taxes, as her mother (Anna Galiena) boasts. Do you think this is the problem? This is not the problem of “Emily in Paris”, or rather not only. The real problem of Darren Star’s Netflix series is that it is yet another repetitive and toxic example of a certain narrative for the female audience, which has done more damage than hail, encouraging a purely materialistic, classist and superficial vision of women and the relationship between the sexes.

It all started with “Sex & The City”, a mythological series from the 90s where women began to be represented again as something detached from the male-centric vision that had dominated until then. Thanks to the Third Wave Feminist movement, the adventures of Carrie and friends in Manhattan became a path of total liberation. At least initially. Then, as the seasons went by, everything became less and less profound and witty, more and more fashionable, glamorous, materialistic and repetitive. That seed would then proliferate over the years in series like “The OC”, “Girls”, “Gossip Girl”, “Desperate Housewives” and so on, shaping a female imaginary of which “Emily in Paris” is simply the latest chapter. An imaginary distorted by an omnipresent, suffocating materiality, where success, money, the good life, the total absence of real problems, go hand in hand with a representation of the male world that to define as limiting and retrograde today is the least. And the damage caused by this imagery in 2024 is before us all, as we look at the increasingly conflictual relationship between the sexes, the superficiality with which we list priorities in life and (hear, hear) the self-concept that a series like “Emily in Paris” can create. But before you accuse me of mansplaining, give me a chance to explain why in reality the men in “Emily in Paris” are victims just as much as those who watch the Eternal City and buy into this “Dolce Far Niente” bullshit that the cinematic crime of “Eat Pray Love” launched.

A horrible idea of ​​man, inside a toxic and backward narrative

The men in “Emily in Paris” all have one thing in common: they are a walking stereotype, made of superficiality and galloping materialism. The French chef, the English banker, the Italian provolone. They are all tall, handsome, all from rich and wealthy families, all frequent exclusive environments with at least 800 euros worth of clothes on them. They don’t say anything interesting but they say it very well, they are all very successful and of high social status, desired by other women and without a hair out of place, not even if they play polo. In short, they are the finished representation of that imaginary “6 feet, 6 abs, 6 figures” that every girl today chases on dating apps or on Instagram, sure that there are plenty of them. But this illusion wasn’t born on Tinder or Hinge, it was born in TV series, from characters like Mr Big and Harvey Specter, passing through Chuck Bass to Emily’s men. With them walks a totally unreal idea of ​​man, in which money defines everything as Americans like, shown as the one to envy and emulate, to desire and fall in love with. In 2024, faced with an increasingly precarious economic and social situation for Millennials and Generation Z, devoid of meritocracy and empathy, in an era in which we talk about female emancipation, gender equality and so on, continuing to propose old-style providers as the ideal male, is no less retrograde or superficial than having female protagonists who are always beautiful, covered (who knows how) in high fashion brands and inside a moving postcard taken word for word from what certain influencers and travel bloggers pass off as reality.

“Emily in Paris” is yet another glamour series for women where things, money, clothes, are worth much more than people, it is a monument to materialism, selfishness and absolute superficiality. “Emily in Paris” will do enormous damage in this sense as other series have done for the female audience in the past, with the difference that today with social media, the boundary between reality and fantasy has become increasingly thinner in our heads. But it is only an illusion of course. The Rome that “Emily in Paris” describes does not exist, there is no garbage, traffic, strikes, crime that have made the Caput Mundi a hell for those who have lived there for ten years. A situation also created by the high rent and the housing crisis, which many foreigners like Emily, who arrived to live “La Dolce Vita” pretending to study or work or as simple tourists, have fueled. Granted, for Americans we are still the ones from “Roman Holiday”, but that doesn’t mean it has to last forever, that it has to stay that way. But above all, if in the end after MeToo, after everything they want to do to remove a male-centric image and identity from women, in return they continue to want to show men who have nothing real, deep and realistic, it’s not like the final result will change. The truth is that a certain narrative of the audiovisual market continues to fuel a vision of life and romantic relationships that is dangerously superficial, selfish, consumerist and vulgar. Emily, who strictly falls in love only with clones of an ideal Bachelor from forty years ago, is an empty, backward and dangerous female character. Compared to Alex from the series “Maid”, played by Margaret Qualley, she appears for what she is: absolute nothingness, covered in sugar, the spirit of a fantasy to be buried.