"Sex and the City", "Emily in Paris" and the fantasy of life

This weekend, I streamed all ten episodes of Emily in Paris, Darren Star’s new series about a twenty-something, played by Lily Collins, who gets offered a once in a lifetime opportunity to work in Paris for a year. From the get-go, it was clear Emily had absolutely no intention of being realistic in any way, shape, or form.

Sure, you can sort of believe this enthusiastic overachiever might find herself going to Paris because of some convenient twist of fate, and sure, you could see her earning 20k Instagram followers by posting only the most basic of Parisian photographs because she is, after all, Lily Collins. But when the show has Brigitte Macron supposedly retweet a rather lame joke Emily makes about French pronouns, you understand that this show exists in a parallel universe, a fantasy land that not even Carrie Bradshaw dared imagine.

Look, it’s not like I’m saying Sex and the City is not as fictitious as they come. This, after all, was the show where the women strolled around NYC in the early morning, scantily clad without any fear or concern. And Carrie Bradshaw’s lifestyle was truly, for the lack of a better word, ridiculous. But when you actually get to thinking about said lifestyle, you might realize Carrie’s life wasn’t all that chic.

Single and fabulous question mark.

Now, I’ll be the first to say Carrie was kind of awful. She was a selfish, immature, self-sabotaging, close-minded, messy woman-child who only seemed to care about shoes and men. Yet, Carrie was still very much a real character. She had a defined, recognizable personality. Hell, she was arguably television’s first anti-heroine. She wasn’t the prototypical strong, empowered female. In fact, you could say she was the opposite: she was needy and desperate to be loved. Carrie was real, warts and all.

Emily, on the other hand, is just an idea, a sketch of a character and that also translates to her sugar-coated surroundings. While Carrie’s life could easily come undone if you dared take a closer look, Emily’s doesn’t have enough complexity to even fall apart. And despite all the times the show tries to actually give Emily some challenges, she breezes through them with that wide and ridiculously charming Lily Collins smile and a pair of well-matched Louboutin stilettos.

Emily is always happy, even when she’s supposed to be sad. When she breaks up with her boyfriend, with whom she apparently had a somewhat strong relationship back in Chicago, she barely sheds a tear. She is in Paris after all, amirite? Plus, she of course has a hot neighbor with whom she’s bound to get together. So her co-workers are being mean to her? No problem, she’ll win over them with a perky attitude and lots of fresh, American ideas. So, she was humiliated in a very public way during an auction? No biggie, just another stone in the way.

I consider myself an optimistic person and am all for having positive characters on television shows. But Emily isn’t a character and she isn’t just positive. To quote Phoebe Buffay: “She’s like Santa Claus on Prozac, in Disneyland, getting laid.” Emily has no discernable personality other than being chipper, she has no ambitions beyond the here and now.

All this could make for a very interesting character, but the problem is that none of these things seem to be intentional. Instead, the writers of Emily in Paris seem to think that Emily’s perpetual smile and quirky clothes are enough to give some depth to her character. Emily is so simple, she actually compares Paris, the city, to Ratatouille, the movie. In other words, this show is the epitome of style over substance.

What does this tell us about our current state? Emily in Paris is meant to be an escapist fantasy to distract us from our now seven-month confinement. In that way, it largely succeeds, because after all, who wouldn’t want to be in Paris right now? Well, Parisians angry at the depiction of their city, perhaps, but that’s another story.

Carrie was very much a child of the late-nineties, a time when women were expected to be outside the box, far from the sexy-kitten, evil-bitch, or nice-homemaker roles they played through the seventies and eighties. Carrie, with all her flaws, and her very prototypical friends who wouldn't be friends with each other were it not for Miss Bradshaw, spoke to the women of Gen X, who found in the girl’s sexual escapades the liberation that had been missing from television.

At its core, Sex and the City was about relationships. For all its talk about empowerment, the women of SatC revolved entirely around men. They weren't single-and-fabulous-exclamation-mark, quite the opposite, actually. They talked about being each other's soulmates, but in the end, all they truly wanted was conventional love. They all end married or in committed, traditional relationships that the show treats as their reward after everything they went through over the past 94 episodes., This, in a way, invalidates the entire premise of the show, because it reinforces the idea that a woman will always need a man to truly be fulfilled.

The girl’s work life was barely important. In fact, it was often discarded in favor of matters of the heart. Miranda, the career-driven, successful lawyer is softened in favor of a more maternal demeanor. She leaves Manhattan and settles in Brooklyn to accommodate her family's needs. She even ends up caring for Steve's mother, which the show treated as personal growth, thus invalidating her entire previous personality.

Women were expected to be ambitious, driven, and goal-oriented, until the moment they found true love, at which point their job became an after-thought. During the late-nineties, the struggle was all about finding romance. It’s no surprise that the one thing Carrie Bradshaw, Rachel Green, and Ally McBeal had in common, was a good job. Like Miranda, Rachel abandoned her promising career, in favor of a life with Ross Geller, of all people. Women were independent, up until they weren't.

Furthermore, Carrie represented a very particular idea: that you can write your own life. Through her column, Carrie detailed her comings and goings (and those of her friends) and in doing so, she also shaped her decisions and actions. In more ways than one, Carrie’s column was as shaped by her life, as her life was shaped by her column.

So, if Carrie lived her life on paper, does that mean Emily lives hers on a cloud? Does Emily represent the idea that you can dream your own life? Is it encouraging you to make your dreams come true, or arguing that you can successfully dream your life away?

So what is Emily in Paris trying to say about Millennials? The story has three prototypes who live up to every single sense of the word. Emily, the wide-eyed, enthusiastic overachiever who wants to eat the world; Mindy, the slacker who harbors dreams of fame and liberty; and Camille, the stable, successful one who’s already making plans to settle down.

Are these the three boxes our generation fits in? Optimist, dreamer, and realist? If I think about my friends, I guess I can pin all of them into one of these boxes, if I sacrifice enough of their individuality. But who in the show gets the short end of the stick? While Emily is still dreaming the dream, and Camille is already living it, it’s Mindy who is left scrapping for crumbs, living with Emily and trying to make it as a singer.

Are dreamers this generation’s wanderers? Millennials do have an obsession for fame and fortune, and we do want it the easy way. We want to become a sensation overnight, whether by singing a song that becomes viral or writing a book that turns into a bestseller. While Boomers saw hard work as the only way up, and Gen Xers saw rebellion as the way forward, we Millennials seem to be stuck somewhere in the middle. We’ll work hard, but only if we’re guaranteed success. Similarly, we’ll rebel against that which doesn’t fit our narrative, whether it’s politics, social conformity, or even the very idea of success.

So what is success to Millennials? What is success to Emily? Earning her co-workers respect? Getting her boss, Sylvie, to like her? Living a passionate romance with Gabriel? All those things are bound to end. She’s a visitor in Paris, and when her year is over, she’ll go back to Chicago and all her achievements will remain in City of Lights.

As Millennials, are we bound to always look for immediate successes? Are we living for the now because things look bleaker than ever and there might be no later? What happens, then, when we get to the next year? Will we always chase those momentary achievements?

If this is our year in Paris, what happens when we go back home?