‘Emily in Paris’ Season Two Debuts, But Are We Tired of All This French Dressing?

*Warning: Un petit spoiler ahead*

What gives, Emily in Paris?

After charming and incensing viewers internationally with a 2020 season of bumbling through fish-out-of-water scenarios set in the French capital, our titular heroine returns to Netflix with ten new episodes, streaming now. But can Emily hold her viewers' attention, especially now that we've all endured another year of intermittent social distancing and social uprising? And also, the original Emily in Paris, Carrie in New York (created by EiP executive Darren Star), is back on our radar without Star's participation and capturing eyeballs with a full panoply of controversial clickbait plot points and podcasts. How can our naïf Emily possibly keep up?

I watched the first episode, and here's my opinion.

First, a recap. When we last saw Emily Cooper (Lily Collins), she was dumbstruck to discover that hot chef Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) was staying in Paris to open a bistro instead of decamping to his native Normandy. Which made their previous night of clandestine, spontaneous goodbye sex awkward, since Gabriel's girlfriend Camille (Camille Razat) was Emily's friend. (Apparently Emily thought she had one-night pass on the bro code?) And Emily works in a marketing agency where there's a bunch of work drama and background noise about her somehow adding value to the company even though she doesn't speak French but does understand Instagram. There, all caught up!

The first episode of season two zooms us right back to where we left our girl Paris, reeling from the apparently electric touch of Gabriel (in truth, the characters do have chemistry, which, props to Lily Collins for managing to throw heat to her male lead through all that bumbling). She's planning a trip to the seaside with her suitor, moneybags Mathieu (Charles Martins), conflicted about leading him on since she just slept with Gabriel. All this becomes plain to the viewer, as well as to her droll boss, agency head Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), at a lunch in which Camille confides that her boyfriend is hiding something about why he stayed in Paris. Clever Sylvie immediately susses out that Emily is involved in a romantic drama, but doesn't care as long as she keeps her mitts off her lover Antoine (William Abadie). But of course, Antoine isn't far from the action, since he's bankrolling Gabriel's restaurant, where a table full of investors has just been served tripe, stewed cow stomach that's traditionally peasant food but now chic because head-to-tail dining is a thing?