Venice, Italy, 2025. Emily Cooper's washes her face when the phone buzzes. A push notification from The Cut. "Carrie Bradshaw Retires Her Manolo Blahniks Once More." She sets the phone down, looks in the mirror, and smiles at the demonic entity that hovers just behind her at all times. Everything is going just the way she planned.
With the timely demise of And Just Like That..., it's fitting that Darren Star's other evil muse, Emily Cooper, would be back to haunt Netflix binge schedules with another season of Emily in Paris. The spiritual successor to Sex and the City and Younger both has picked up cameras in Venice for a fifth season, following on the twist ending of season four that saw Emily relocate from the show's infamous Parisian locales. (Infamous only for the way locals so clearly feel about the deeply indulgent, totally American project.
The show's penchant for European stereotypes will continue, it appears, as star Lily Collins has already been papped on the canals of Italy's sinking city. Following mass protests against the invasion of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez's cabal of desperate hanger-ons, I'm curious if we'll see similar signage and activism around Netflix's hit TV show. Probably not, but wouldn't it be funny? Knowing show runner Star, he'd likely write it into the show as a side plot about Emily's next marketing project for a digital tampon that collects user data.
As can be seen in photographs, she's in another pair of goofy gloves and a totally unbecoming hat. I love it, because it's so clearly a costume and so clearly silly and so clearly detached from reality — the exact cocktail that makes Emily in Paris so delectable to watch. It's often billed as the next Sex and the City for its use of fashion and sex in the plot, but that diminishes both sides of the comparison. Emily's only similarity to Carrie is that they're both evil and they love to cheat. That's a compliment, in case I'm misunderstood, but bears repeating. In all other aspects these are two totally separate shows, if only because Darren Star seems to have suffered some unspeakable tragedy that now causes him to write TV shows that feature the below musical number:
There's also this particularly memorable bit of editing in season two, which features the now immensely quoted line: "Leave me alone, you illiterate sociopath." Out of context, it reads like comedic gold. Framed within the show, it left me wondering just what happened to Star in the intervening years since absconded from Sex and the City. What unspeakable evil did Carrie Bradshaw to do the poor man, to make him act out this way through his "illiterate sociopath" avatar, Emily Cooper?
We've also got first looks at the show's other lead, Ashley Park, seen filming in the area with Collins under a sea of production umbrellas and hair clips. I worry that she won't have more drag numbers in season five. If the chaos demon that haunts Emily Cooper goes hungry, nobody can know who she'll cheat with next.
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