Hacker Cinema
Emily in Paris
2020 · TV series · 6 seasons
Created by Darren Star
New passions. New fashions. New Emily? A plucky American marketing whiz spreads her wings in life and love after landing her dream job in Paris.
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9 comments on Hacker News
Nobody Wants This; Bridgerton; Wednesday; Man on the Inside; 3 Body Problem; Emily in Paris; the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender; Love, Death, and Robots; How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast); Is It Cake?; Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney; and some others I’ve definitely had conversations about outside my own household.
Arcane was a pretty big deal and it was released on Netflix and TenCent.
They also have continued series that originated on other networks, including Unsolved Mysteries and Black Mirror.
I know several people who watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix and are excited about the upcoming CDPR and Netflix project set in the Cyberpunk universe.
I’ve had recommended to me and have recommended to others quite a few of their original movies. You might like 6 Undergound if you’re looking for an action movie.
> It seems common in the US to have TVs in several rooms and have them run in the background for long stretched of day. This is far less common in the cultures I've lived in where sitting down to watch TV alone or together is more of an occasion and modal.
From yesterday on Marketplace: Why streaming networks love a good background show https://www.marketplace.org/2023/04/11/why-streaming-networks-love-a-good-background-show/
> Tomorrow Warner Bros. Discovery is supposed to reveal it’s new but not really new streaming service. What once was called HBO Max will now just be called Max, according to The New York Times.
> Beyond the name change, it could include more light reality TV shows like “Dr. Pimple Popper” and “House Hunters International” —you know, the shows you might put on in the background while you’re doing chores, paying bills or working.
> There’s a term for shows like that: ambient streaming.
And from a few years ago: “Emily in Paris” and the Rise of Ambient TV- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/emily-in-paris-and-the-rise-of-ambient-tv
> In this and other recent programming, Netflix is pioneering a genre that I’ve come to think of as ambient television. It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions. Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic.
IIRC there was an internal “competition”, of sorts, between the two head original content buyers at Netflix. One took the HBO approach: buy high quality content, even if it’s expensive. The other had a spray and pray strategy: buy up all the cheap crap and hope you get a few hits.
Long story short the Spray & Pray exec got promoted and the other exec got squeezed out. But now that all of the major studios have started their own streaming services (and have started being stingier with their licensing) original content is perhaps the most important driver of new subscriptions and subscription maintenance for a streaming platform. And it seems Netflix bet the house on building their library out of cheap crap like Emily in Paris and God’s Favorite Idiot with the occasional expensive (but still crappy) Ryan Reynolds action movie sprinkled in to keep things “fresh”.
Netflix made a huge mistake when they went with the spaghetti against the wall strategy and for some reason they just keep doubling down to make their already shitty strategy even worse.
There's really odd undertones in a lot of Netflix shows
Big Mouth (a cartoon) is about child sex
Emily in Paris, character lead has sex with a 17yo on screen.
There are more, I just can't bring them to mind at the moment. Perhaps I should begin to document them.
Hmm... Black Mirror (the Netflix episodes) had child sex in, End of The Fucking World had child sex in it; although both with negative consequences so poor examples.
Maybe it's coincidental, but it is something I've started to notice more and more.
Keep it in mind next time you watch some shows on Netflix and perhaps it will stand out.
To people like me, "discovery" is worthless. Most of the day we do things together in the real world as a family. Like building a Lego marble run for the umpteenth time. Kids have a lot of energy. That means us parents are willing to "waste" maybe 1 hour every evening to watch TV together.
My wife's friends watch Emily in Paris. My friends watch Expanse and Silent Sea. So I already know the 3 series that I'm watching in the near future so that we can gossip about them with our friends. And if I want a movie, I can ask that one friend who has been giving me great movie recommendations for the past 10 years...
When I think about using Netflix discovery and going down the rabbit hole of watching random stuff recommended by a robot, it kind of makes me feel pity for the lonely people who have nothing better to do than watch TV alone. I really can't imagine how that could be beneficial to the human doing it.
I saw some improvement in the Netflix movies getting less extreme over time. Emily in Paris was the first movie where the woke Netflix made fun of itself using French people / culture as props. Disney and Netflix had to lose billions of dollars to understand that the loudest voices may not represent the majority of the people.
> with the inability to enjoy Jim Jamush movies.
I don't believe I did. Only mentioned them as something I like and think of as prime example of "slow movies" where you could potentially switch off. The article goes well beyond the Emily in Paris itself.
I think I am immune to the appeal of grindy computer games. I never gotten why people replay for achievements or stats, and I get bored by online games that focus on leveling. Even multiplayer based on competition and community are not really my thing. My favorite games are story based, and I hate the recent trend of RPGs to have free world grinding and base building for no reason other than stats and achievements. I was one of those people angry at the online Fallout game, for example.
And that being said, I DO also watch stupid TV. Recently, my wife and me have been watching Gilmore Girls, which is an objectively "bad" late 90's soap. I haven't watched Emily in Paris yet, but I might!
So I think there are people who require these shows as because they need background noise, however I also think that sometimes some shallow soap is exactly what you might want to watch.
In any case, kudos to op for implicating the author's dislike of Emily in Paris with the inability to enjoy Jim Jamush movies. A masterful troll move.
This article says more about the author than about the series. They can't keep attention on what they're watching and think that silly tv series are a new thing.
Alternative take: Emily in Paris is a tv series where you shouldn't expect a lot of thinking, you'll find a new character introduced once in a while when you need new content, everything is obvious and striped to the core of the conveyed idea, and there are love stories and nice shots of France. That's it - you may enjoy it or not. If you get distracted with Instagram in the meantime, maybe you're just not that interested. The core is really not that different from Friends, for example. Or any of the 10+ season series. (I wouldn't go as far as the classic soaps - those had their own specific fake-dramatic style)
I get that the author may just not like the format. They'd be bored by Jiro, they'd sleep during Helvetica, and they'd probably die watching Herzog movies. But they should acknowledge their biases rather than pretend they stumbled upon some shift in tv.
(Ftr, I enjoyed Emily in Paris as silly entertainment, but I also find slow burn movies really fun. Jim Jarmusch makes me more engaged than most action movies)
Added: for the entertainment value, I'd pay to read their review of Twin Peaks...