The news flashed up like a red béret: Netflix has endorsed a real-life Emily in Paris-themed trip to the French capital, based on its hit TV show. The four-night visit includes a masterclass on “the art of flirting” (taught by a woman meant to resemble Emily’s cruel-but-sexy boss); a lesson on baking pain au chocolat; optional runs along the Seine, like Emily takes in the series; and many evening apéros.
There is no shortage of Emily-themed activities in Paris. The tourist office publishes its own guide to destinations from the show, and there are dozens of unofficial tours (several warn participants not to attempt their three-hour walks wearing stilettos). Last autumn I attended an American’s Emily-themed bar mitzvah here; the party T-shirt had stars of David inserted into the cross-hatches of the Eiffel Tower.
But Netflix’s official “Paris by Emily” tour (the first one is scheduled for next April) reaches a new level of TV-meets-world surreality: the makers of a TV show about an American fantasy of Paris are trying to deliver that imagined version of the city to real-life visitors. It’s as if Lewis Carroll sponsored guided tours of Wonderland, or George Lucas offered to take you into space. (The tour’s starting rate of £2,928 per person, not including airfare, suggests organisers have the means to remove any unwanted sights.)
It’s hard to track all the vectors of meta-weirdness. The inaugural tour guide or “Emileader”, Ines Tazi, is a French-Moroccan Instagram sensation who has appeared on Netflix reality TV shows. (“I love creating bridges between online and offline, fiction and reality,” she says.) Whereas the fictional Emily posts Paris-themed selfies, the tour operator – a company called Dharma – promises a trip that’s “designed to be iconic from every angle, ensuring you don’t just live your best life – you have the pics to prove it”.
At first glance, the Emily tour seems like another case of media companies trying to upsell their fanciest subscribers, just as the rich have come to expect exclusive, highly curated activities where they mingle with each other. Tour participants can pay extra for a hair and makeup service, or to create their own perfume. Netflix is American, so they’ll presumably have to arrange any extramarital affairs on their own.
But I think the desire to be subsumed in an escapist TV show is a product of our current cultural moment, too. Americans have dreamed of Paris ever since Benjamin Franklin marvelled over the city’s stylish inhabitants in the 18th century, and wrote that he “was once very near making love to my friend’s wife”. But the Paris fantasy has taken on special resonance in the face of terrifying climate change; vast and growing political cleavages; eroding rights for American women; and the possibility of future pandemics.
In a recent IFOP poll for the website Bonjour New York of 1,113 Americans aged 18 and over, 36% said they’d like to live in France, up from 20% in 2005. There may be an Emily effect: among those who had watched the series, 54% said they would live or work in France if they could, compared with 25% of those who had not.
Among Americans in Paris like me, identifying errors on the show – from the oversized apartments to the French people speaking English to each other – has become a kind of sport. But the show’s fans fact check in reverse: they consider the scripted version of Paris to be the gold standard, and reality a poor second-best. Tourists have written scathing reviews of a bakery featured in the series, because its real-life croissants didn’t provide the Emily’s transcendent experience. “We’re just a neighbourhood boulangerie, we’re not selling dreams,” one employee said.
Emily fans seem to crave a place – even an imagined one – without disappointments, where bad things rarely happen. In the IFOP poll, about half of viewers insisted Paris has no rats or homeless people and 76% said they believed “most French people dress elegantly in their every-day lives”. Lily Collins, who plays Emily, admitted that, after all the prancing on cobblestones in heels, she had to get orthopaedic inserts.
The series wants it both ways. When Collins appeared on the French talk show C à vous last year, an interviewer said the show was a “postcard” that ignores the city’s reality. “We own every aspect of the show being fantasy based, and also based in a realism, showing Paris in many different ways,” Collins replied.
The French want it both ways, too. They groan about the cliches, but they like the attention and the tourist spending, and French Vogue put Collins on its cover. (In another boomerang, Collins said she’s starting to dress more like the character she plays on the show.) And to be fair, it’s sometimes hard to know where the Parisian stereotypes end and real life begins. A woman in the French fashion industry recently told me that she once spent an evening trying to keep her boss’s mistress away from his wife at an office party, just like on the show.
Perhaps boosted by the series, the past few months in Paris felt like a full-scale American invasion. Even at cafes far from the Emily loop, I often heard more English than French. Visits to the Paris region were up 27% in the first four months of 2023 on the same period last year (they’re still 2.5% below 2019 levels). Americans and Britons comprise the biggest groups of foreign visitors.
With Emily’s fourth season approaching I’d suggest another kind of escapist speciality tour: one that introduces foreigners to France’s free preschools; its practically free universities; and its universal healthcare. Real-life Paris is trying to address climate change by installing kilometres of bike lanes and making Europe’s biggest expansion of its public transit system, with 68 new metro stations in the suburbs.
Instead of honing the seduction skills of anxious Americans, the social services tour would show them an encouraging, alternative model for how to run a country. Perhaps I’ll set it up. I wonder how much I could charge.
Pamela Druckerman, an American writer based in Paris, is the author of five books including French Children Don’t Throw Food
