Emily in Paris season 4 part 1 spoilers follow.
Emily in Paris is for the girls and gays. It always has been. And that should come as no surprise given it's the brainchild of Sex in the City creator Darren Star. But like that show, Emily in Paris is a camp delight that sadly falls short when it comes to depicting actual gays on screen.
Early seasons were particularly guilty of this, playing into the gay best friend trope with Julien, whose entire function was to be the arbiter of all things gossip. An important function, sure, but that meant Samuel Arnold's character was even more one-dimensional than Emily herself.
The first half of season four rectifies this somewhat with a new arc for Julien where he briefly leaves Sylvie's firm after being overlooked by her and the show alike. It's refreshing to see him have some agency at last – as short-lived as it was – but part one doesn't fare so well with what's supposed to be an even-bigger queer storyline at the heart of it all.
Remember in the season three finale when Camille told her wedding congregation that Gabriel was in love with Emily, not her? The drama! We live. And then, as if that wasn't enough, Gabriel dropped a bombshell of his own at the end when he revealed to Emily that Camille is now pregnant with his baby.
It was about time that Camille got her due after watching Emily and Gabriel play (tonsil) tennis back-and-forth with each other's emotions across those first three seasons.
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So far, so camp, and let's not forget that Camille had also found a new love of her own that season with a woman named Sofia. The pair seemed to have chemistry, although it was hard to tell given how rushed their whole affair was. And the same can also be said for where we find them both at the start of season four.
After Camille supposedly goes missing, she returns to Paris with Sofia where they plan to raise Gabriel's baby together as a family. Yes, really. It's quite an abrupt shift, to say the least, going from an affair to motherhood so fast, although it turns out that's kind of the point.
In episode four, Camille and Sofia suddenly clash out of nowhere when they go furniture shopping. Together, they quickly realise that they want very different things. It's almost as if Sofia doesn't want to raise Gabriel's baby at all – almost as if she suddenly rushed into it without thinking things through...
Camille is hot, so we get it, but the problem is that the pair don't share any scenes of their own before that clash. Everything about their relationship up to that point has been framed with Emily or Gabriel in mind. They're only given a scene of their own now to quickly signpost the breakup that comes just one episode later.
Yep, that's all it takes. Just two scenes (spread across two episodes) for these women in love to break up completely. We shouldn't be surprised, though. Camille has long been positioned as a nuisance in the way of Gabriel and Emily's One True Love™, while Sofia was always just a cut-out figure introduced to lure Camille away and create drama.
If that all feels quite tropey and derogative of queer women, wait until you see how the first part of season four ends.
Now that she's lost Sofia, Camille quickly grows jealous of Emily and Gabriel again, watching them be all romantic and kissy outside her window. Soon after, we then follow Camille to a checkup at the doctors, where it's revealed that the pregnancy test must have given a false positive, that Camille isn't pregnant at all, and she never was.
To be clear, Camille genuinely thought that she was going to have a baby, so the news comes as quite a shock to her as well. And with that, she's suddenly lost Sofia, Gabriel and a child that never was all in the space of six episodes, if we include the season three finale.
That's a lot for anyone to deal with, so when Camille lies at the end and pretends she can't drink alcohol still because of "The Baby", it's understandable, to some degree. Camille feels alone and vulnerable knowing that Gabriel won't stick around once he finds out the truth.
But without knowing what comes next, it feels like Camille is being set up as a villain of sorts for the rest of season four, spinning out lies that will undoubtedly blow up in everyone's face by the end.
In theory, there's nothing wrong with throwing some bisexual chaos into the mix. Emily in Paris thrives on le drame, after all. But when a show this camp consistently fails to do right by its queer characters, playing into the "evil bisexual" trope is severely outdated, much like Emily's fashion in season one.
The Depraved Bisexual trope, as it's also known, suggests that bisexuals don't recognise boundaries of any kind, be they gender or morality. These are the characters who will steal your sweetheart away and make them queer or bisexual, too, the kind who wouldn't think twice about lying or manipulating others to satiate their greedy desires.
If this sounds familiar, congrats! It sounds like you're having a whale of a time. But the vast majority of people aren't like this, queer or otherwise, so it's unfortunate that Emily in Paris chose to make its only bisexual of note the chaotic, messy one in a show where queers of any kind are few and far between.
Because Emily in Paris isn't just for the girls and gays. It's for the bisexuals, too, and it's about time Darren Star's show stops feeding into tropes that were popular back when Sex and the City was still on the air. It was bad enough with all the French and Ukrainian stereotypes.
Emily in Paris seasons 1-3 are streaming on Netflix. Season 4 part 1 is available to watch now, and season 4 part 2 will arrive on Thursday, September 12.
Read more Emily in Paris news on our dedicated homepage.
After teaching in England and South Korea, David turned to writing in Germany, where he covered everything from superhero movies to the Berlin Film Festival.
In 2019, David moved to London to join Digital Spy, where he could indulge his love of comics, horror and LGBTQ+ storytelling as Deputy TV Editor, and later, as Acting TV Editor.
David has spoken on numerous LGBTQ+ panels to discuss queer representation and in 2020, he created the Rainbow Crew interview series, which celebrates LGBTQ+ talent on both sides of the camera via video content and longform reads.
Beyond that, David has interviewed all your faves, including Henry Cavill, Pedro Pascal, Olivia Colman, Patrick Stewart, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Dornan, Regina King, and more — not to mention countless Drag Race legends.
As a freelance entertainment journalist, David has bylines across a range of publications including Empire Online, Radio Times, INTO, Highsnobiety, Den of Geek, The Digital Fix and Sight & Sound.
