Forget plot, Emily in Paris has surrendered to Instagram

They wear sexy branded underwear and allude coyly to Big Ds, but they never show a nipple. The nuns love the suspender belts too. It’s what you’ve always wanted Europe to be. It’s Emily in Paris – and now Rome, too.

Short-form video has such a grip on the human attention span that media futurists are beginning to wonder whether other formats – films, books, podcasts, written journalism – will survive the next couple of decades. Given how successful Netflix has been, I would not have expected it to succumb to the same pessimism. 

But series five of Emily in Paris has downloaded Instagram to its phone and is unwrapping the white flag. Hashtag surrender, for those who didn’t get the reference.

This is the moment when TV drama abandoned its commitment to plot, suspense and character development. The struggle was finished. It loved TikTok.

Rome will recover from what Emily has done to it. (Go to Trajan’s market, it’s basically a Roman shopping mall.) But the transplant to Italy is worse than that, because the mild ambivalence towards Paris that made the earlier seasons entertaining – yes, you are beautiful, but you can be such a bitch – is lost when Emily moves to the new Rome office of Agence Grateau. 

When the acting and dialogue are sufficiently compelling, this doesn’t matter. The Merchant-Ivory production of A Room With a View got away with romanticising Italy because Forster’s novel and the frisson between Helena Bonham-Carter and Julian Sands made you believe that only a place like this could drive out English repression. But one of the key seduction scenes in Emily in Paris plays out thus:

‘You’re really cute. Am I allowed to say that?’

‘I think you just did.’

Hot but discreet shags follow.

Indeed, Emily in Paris must be one of the few films or TV series that manage to strip Rome of any sensuality. Sex is either anodyne or played out in nudge-wink double entendres.

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At its most crass, an Italian is denied entry to the convent where her lover Luc (Bruno Gouery) is staying because the 11 o’clock curfew has passed. Undaunted, she calls up to his window and opens her red coat to flash her lingerie. The nuns are appalled, but we learn later that they are seeking out Intimissimi underwear. The brand is important.

Things pick up slightly when Paris brings back its main-character energy to the series. But gratifyingly, the best thing about Emily in Paris is British. This is not because jacked-of-all-trades Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) is given a personality or the ability to interrogate his actions, but is down to Minnie Driver. She enjoys herself thoroughly as a principessa who married Italian aristocracy for the real estate and finds herself in need of ready cash: “I’m palazzo poor!”.

‘Princess Jane’ – don’t knock it, we all need a memorable handle – carries around a selfie stick and poses with bottles of Italian beer. She is vulgar and insufferable, the epitome of the post-Brexit Brit desperate to cling on to a luxury European lifestyle that is now beyond her means.

Princess Jane is America’s quiet revenge for all the arrogant American characters that our novelists have depicted trampling over European sensibilities. She is magnificent, and there is every sign she will return in future series.

The fact that the hot men lack significant personality traits is useful. It means Emily can dispense with a serious relationship in 90 seconds flat and not appear in the least bit callous. 

Fans of her boss Sylvie Grateau (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) will be glad to hear that she still acts Emily (Lily Collins) off the screen and has a fling with a much younger man. Props, too, to the costume staff. Emily models a succession of outfits that are either very chic or slightly bizarre. This is an elite skill, and they are very good at it.

While the move to Rome is, dramatically speaking, a disaster, it suggests that the producers are open to future déplacements. Emily could go anywhere where the men are hot, the food is Instagrammable and Mindy (Ashley Park) can take most of her kit off in public.

This probably rules out Dubai, at least for the next few years. Stockholm has potential. Could London be the next destination? I confess to a yearning for a terrible finale in which Emily’s phone is snatched on Piccadilly, she is stranded in zone six on a Saturday night and her jerry-built penthouse on the Thames crumbles underneath her. 

This series offers the tiniest hint that social media might not enhance all the places it touches. We can imagine that one of the scriptwriters has glimpsed her own fate.

Series five of Emily in Paris is on Netflix