Ope Pardon, No. 19: Hibernate & Hate

Before I wax about an entirely unrelated topic, I would like to add a brief caveat to my previously unmitigated endorsement of the Normal Gossip podcast.

This past week, I made it to season 3 and, in my own personal opinion, the season 3 episodes are simply not good. Even skipping the whole introduction segment, I found the gossip to be less juicy and the guest involvement more...contrived? I am not sure why we need to know what they would do about extremely unremarkable plot points in the stories or whether they have experience with extremely common character details, nor do I think the "who do you think the villain is?" question at the end has been especially fruitful, especially now as the stories have strayed further and further from the high chaos of previous seasons. I still stand by the recommendation, especially for the first season — perfection — but if you started with the most recent episodes and were let down, I can relate.

Moving on!

As some of you may already know, a couple weeks ago the third season of Emily in Paris dropped on Netflix. Worldwide fans of "bad" TV rejoiced, including but not limited to Parisians and Americans in Paris, for whom the series holds a special place in their hate-watching hearts. Seriously, it is beloved here.

I say "they" because, to-date, I have not watched even an errant Instagram Reel of Emily in Paris.

I am a fan of bad TV and I enjoy a good hate-watch. I also tend to enjoy any kind of mess produced by Darren Star. However, since it first premiered in October 2020, I have found myself unable to bring myself to even try to watch the series.

You see, it was also October 2020 that I started telling people I was moving to Paris and, being a young(ish) American white woman, and from Chicago, and working in marketing, the "omg just like Emily in Paris!" comments have been with me since the jump.

(Brief moment of acknowledgment and sympathy for my friend who moved to Paris at the same time who is literally named Emily and hears that refrain 3000 times a day but seems blessedly not to be burdened with the particular complex that makes you write 1,000 words about why it makes you anxious.)

At the time, I felt, in my bones, that I would find the series unbearable in its inaccuracies and how it would "misrepresent" the expat experience. I felt sure that even knowing, with complete rational clarity, that the accurate representation of Paris or Americans in Paris was the last thing on ole Darren's mind would not ease my anger at watching it unfold.

(In semi-related matters, back in October of 2022, when I was thinking a lot of about newsletter topics but not actually writing anything, I started kicking around with a friend of mine what I was calling the proximity theory of bad TV — that the pleasure of a certain type of bad fiction is proportional to how well you know the subject matter. My friend, a lawyer, was driven up the wall by a Netflix series called Partner Track, a show I found poorly written but innocuous. I, as stated, couldn't even begin Emily in Paris. The theory has several holes and remains half-baked — plenty of lawyers and Americans in Paris love(d) Partner Track and Emily in Paris, respectively — but yeah, food for thought.)

In any case, lately — that is, this past December with the release of the third season and simultaneous near-total ease of whatever tension I was carrying with respect to the show — I realized that my reluctance to indulge in the hate-watch might have been a wee bit more complex.

I have this thing about being unimpeachable. (Yes, yes, I am working on it in therapy.) I am not a classic perfectionist in the sense that everything I do or touch or experience must be perfect. My style of cooking is "aesthetic mess but tastes good" and I have embraced, since college, an "ehh that's good enough" ethos for huge swaths of the human experience. However, when things go bad, I do need to feel that I have done my best and my behavior was beyond reproach. Which is to say, I am fine with shitshows that are not my fault and I can live with mistakes that seemed like good ideas at the time. (I also frequently use self-awareness as a loophole for making very, very reproachable decisions, thus allowing all my unhealthy compulsions to thrive in harmony. We are all rich tapestries of our neuroses.)

My implicit fear, then, about Emily in Paris, that I think I've only been able to articulate now that I feel sure it is unfounded, was that anytime someone said "oh my god, just like Emily in Paris!" they would be right.

Not just about being an American in Paris, or more precisely, an American woman from Chicago working in marketing at a French company in Paris, which are simply facts, but about all the gauche, insufferable things about Emily as well. I have been sensitive about being that American expat since I was 16 and several of my friends loved to drunkenly run around Rome screaming "io faccio una mela" and the confluence of the cultural permeation of this new series and the unearthing of that teenage insecurity on the eve of moving back to Europe was just not something I was ready to touch with a ten-foot pole. I know it is ridiculous to be triggered by any TV show, especially Emily in Paris, but there we were.

But then! This past December, a couple weeks shy of the two-year anniversary of when I moved to Paris, I realized that I actually wanted to watch the show, was keen, even, to get in on the hate-watch fun and felt no real risk of spiraling out over my identity. Growth!

This was, no doubt, from finally feeling comfortable and confident that my life and behavior here is irreproachably (!) different from hers. (Obviously such thinking patterns should not be encouraged which makes it also funny to imagine a therapist prescribing watching Emily in Paris as exposure therapy.) I am certainly not the perfect American in Paris, whatever that means, but I speak French, have not (to my knowledge) slept with anyone's boyfriend, and the only time my American-ness seems to inconvenience my coworkers is when I can't use French Venmo because of obnoxious tax laws.

I ultimately didn't watch Emily in Paris on Christmas Eve, nor did I watch it New Year's weekend. But if there is one thing I learned living in Emily's city of origin, it's that winter doesn't actually start until January which means there are several potentially frigid weekends ahead during which I can hibernate, hate and (not) relate.