If you’ve been keeping up with the labyrinthine plot of the Émile Zola–style chronicle of contemporary life in the City of Lights known as Emily in Paris, you may have been excited to discover that, with the start of the show’s fourth season, Emily Cooper is single! This is big news because our American heroine has rarely not had a boyfriend. She started the show with her doofy Chicago bf (played by the guy who also played Prince Charles in Diana: The Musical, something only important to me), then quickly got caught up in an infatuation with her locationally convenient chef neighbor Gabriel. He has a girlfriend, the French blonde Camille, but after ups and downs, Gabriel and Emily get together. Later on, there’s a love triangle between them and the insanely fit British business guy Alfie, who talks like he’s auditioning for a role in a Guy Ritchie movie. For convoluted reasons that involve a hot-air balloon and Camille’s secret lesbian relationship/surprise pregnancy, by the time season four kicks off, Emily is on the outs with both Gabriel and Alfie and, as advertised in the show’s trailer, free to run around Paris in a seasonally inappropriate vest ogling the many hot men of Paris.
When I watched that trailer, I was like, this is a fun idea! Emily should get to enjoy some sexe dans la cité. But sadly, once I compulsively watched the screeners made available to critics, I discovered that Emily would not, in fact, be having the time of her life as a single girl, tasting all the flavors of Paris like Julia Child at a sexual farmers’ market. As soon as she gets back from her run in episode three, she discovers that Gabriel is hanging out in her apartment’s shower (Camille and her girlfriend have taken over his apartment; the most realistic thing about this show is the lack of available housing) and returns to her exhausting dynamic with him. The episode ends with a lavish masquerade party where, quelle surprise, both Alfie and Gabriel realize they still have feelings for her.
The whole thing between Emily and Gabriel, at this point, has been thoroughly played out, and the show struggles to come up with new ways to keep it fresh. This season’s complications: He’s anxious about Camille’s pregnancy; he really wants a Michelin star but hates the pastry chef he hired to fill out his menu (that is fun; I enjoy French guy–on–French guy violence); and he and Emily have sex on a roof, which she finds shocking and scandalous. By the end of this half-season, the romantic universe of Emily in Paris feels smaller than ever. Do these people ever talk to anyone else?
That’s a problem baked into the structure of the series. Emily, perhaps true to her prudish Adderall-y millennial type, is not especially flirty. She’s bright and sunny and wants to think of herself as fun but rarely pushes herself outside her comfort zone. While her best friend Mindy is set up as more of a Samantha-style libertine, she too has become serially monogamous — currently, she’s tied up in a somehow very serious story about sexual harassment and family inheritance, as she’s dating the scion of a luxury conglomerate with a terrible father (though it is fun that the actor Paul Forman and Ashley Park are dating in real life). The show’s French characters are more comfortable with affairs, at least; Sylvie has had a husband and, for a time, a man on the side.
But Emily in Paris lacks a mechanism to introduce a wider spectrum of characters for these people to interact with romantically. The show is really defined by work, not romance — Emily is always meeting new clients and rarely meeting new lovers. Those clients themselves are rarely lovers, but it’s not because Emily herself has a healthy work-life balance; she happily sells her relationship with Alfie for an ad campaign and does pro bono social-media work for Gabriel’s restaurant. (I guess she eats there for free … heyo!) That’s fine and maybe part of a larger point about American capitalism spreading abroad or something. But I do wish there were more men! Unlike Sex and the City’s New York — or the other Darren Star New York project Younger, which threw Hilary Duff and Sutton Foster into a few kooky flings with publishing types alongside their primary love interests — Emily in Paris’s Paris is rather small and increasingly claustrophobic. In the Star universe, oddly, there is more fun to be had at home than abroad.
In the interest of being solution-driven and forward-thinking like a good American with a pitch deck in hand abroad, I have come up with a short list of men in Paris who Emily should consider dating or just having a fling with instead of Alfie and Gabriel. (I would say she should also consider women, but that feels like a stretch for her, honestly.) The list includes:
• An annoying Left Bank intellectual who tells her about Sartre.
• A backpacker on his way to the Alps.
• A rival chef of Gabriel’s who is his archnemesis but she doesn’t realize it until after they’ve hooked up.
• A DJ.
• A deeply self-absorbed member of the Comédie-Française.
• Bradley Cooper, but he speaks French the whole time because that is something he likes to do to show off.
• A Minion.
• A French guy who is himself basic and famous on Instagram, creating feelings of instability and confusion about Emily’s own identity.
• A German guy who makes those hacky TikToks about being German. She would love the engagement.
• Any cast member from the TV series Call My Agent!
• Emmanuel Macron.
• That one shirtless guy she saw running (he is probably American, as this is not a very European activity, but that’s fine).
• An Olympic breakdancer.
• Léon Marchand.
• A man inside the costume of the Olympics mascot Phryge.
Emily, if you need any more pitches, please be in touch.