Emily in Paris season five isn’t just bad TV, it reinforces the worst aspects of aspirational materialism

Watching Emily in Paris is like having little bits of your brain scooped out with a teeny melon-baller. It hollows out your capacity for critical thought piece by piece.

It’s a deadening effect, and you may not even realise you’ve been zombified by its witchy powers of persuasion. After five hours of its lurid world of shiny things and no emotional stakes, you too might believe unapologetic consumerism and materialism is the apex of human existence.

Greed is good. Marketing-fuelled fantasies are even better.

More than any other series, Emily in Paris captures the shallowness of internet aspiration culture, of influencers teasing a life that you apparently should want.

Maybe that’s why bingeing the series makes you feel so empty inside, because there’s nothing more to that show than its surface. There’s more nutritional value in a McDo thickshake than in a single frame of Emily in Paris.

With its fifth season dropping tonight on Netflix, the series gets progressively worse with each episode.

Never mind the lazy filmmaking with its continuity errors (same scene, same outfit on top, different shoes) or its poor editing (profile shots of characters whose spoken dialogue does not match their lips). Forcing Ashley Park into terrible lip-syncing every time she sings — we know she can belt it out, just let her do it live.

As an aside, Park needs to fire whoever is allowing her character to be dressed as a cross between a 1980s Vegas showgirl and a Shein product model. It’s not that her costumes are ridiculous or fahshun, it’s that they’re ugly.

The most offensive thing about Emily in Paris is, well, its entire raison d’etre. It’s enough to make you read Jean-Paul Sartre as an act of resistance.

Oh, it’s a bit of harmless escapism, it’s just something to have on in the background while you’re scrolling on your phone, its defenders would cry.

It’s actually so much more insidious than that. It might seem frothy and light, but it’s just buttering you up, making you pliable as a vessel for the marketing messages embedded through the series.

Even if you can’t jet-set off to Paris, Rome and Venice right now, you can still buy that L’Oreal lipstick or Intimissimi lingerie you didn’t know you wanted. Or take a swig of that Peroni beer. Those are just some of the brands who bought themselves airtime in this season.

In one episode, Emily bonds with a group of Americans over a Friends-themed trivia night (cue the eyeroll), which triggers a bout of homesickness.

She ends up at the US consulate over July 4 but rather than any critical examination of what it really means to be an expat in a foreign country beyond one line of dialogue about missing weddings and babies (notably, no mention of family), the bulk of the scene is her going nuts over American food products.

Have you ever actually had a Pop-Tart? It’s disgusting.

It’s another example of consumerism standing in for anything substantive, pretending to be poignant when it’s not.

That Emily and her colleagues work in marketing is part of this tapestry of materialism as success.

They spend their days strategising on how to make people buy things they didn’t want, or how to sell a lifestyle people can’t afford or need. You could argue that, sure, they mostly seem to work in the luxury space, but we all know there’s a flow-on. Miranda Priestley told us so.

There’s one character, Antonia Galiena, the mother of Emily’s love interest Marcello, who is in charge of a small but elite Italian cashmere brand. She’s resistant to expansion, which puts her at odds with Marcello and Emily.

Antonia wants to keep the brand authentic to its legacy, and argued that increasing its output would compromise its quality. But the hyper-capitalism of Emily in Paris can’t allow for that. Marcello is positioned as the future and Antonia as the past, and the future demands voracious growth.

Right before a marketing event with invited influencers who have all been asked to post at the end of the evening, Emily says, “For years, it operated as quiet luxury, if you know, you know. But after tonight, we want everyone, everywhere to know.”

Oh, how clever! Incroyable!

Time and again, growth equals success, and to grow, you must market. You must exploit a social cause to rehabilitate a toxic company, such as in one episode with the rebrand of a “homophobic” bottled water company sponsoring a float at Paris Pride.

Marketing as a discipline, as a belief system, is positioned as not only as triumphant, but as virtuous.

Emily in Paris isn’t just characters selling within its world, the show itself is selling the audience on the idea that shallow aspiration is a good thing. You should want this life because look how shiny it is.

Look at the clothes, the private yacht, the extravagant parties, and the spritzes, prosecco and champagne imbibed on canal-side and rooftop terraces. Where all of life’s little problems can be solved with a jingle and a tagline.

Obviously, not everything in life has to be doom and gloom. There are plenty of series and films that are serious explorations of deep themes.

But Emily in Paris has been selling this lie that it’s just a little escapist fantasy when in actuality, it represents some of the worst aspects of capitalist materialism.

We already have Instagram for that.