Low-stakes, sanitised fluff finishing with a Gallic shrug

The titular character of 'Emily in Paris' still comes across like she's been engineered in a lab, writes Katie Rosseinsky, as the chocolate box Netflix hit returns for a fourth season

- Katie Rosseinsky

Four years on from the lockdown debut of Emily in Paris, you may already have strong feelings about the Netflix show. Is the drama, in which Lily Collins plays a wide-eyed American transplanted to the French capital to wear mad outfits and instruct her colleagues in the art of #socialmedia, enjoyably lowstakes fluff that knowingly winks at its own silliness? Or is it the epitome of everything that's wrong with streaming-era TV: pretty, plotless "content" designed to be watched with one eye on your phone screen and your mind elsewhere?

Whichever camp you fall into, you will find very little to change your mind in the first half of the show's fourth season. Just like Bridgerton, another Netflix show that seems to follow the "no plot, just vibes" school of television making, the 10-episode run has been divided into two instalments of five. As ever, Emily's sanitised, heavily filtered version of Paris makes Richard Curtis's London look gritty - no one would ever get sick after swimming in this parallel universe Seine.