Emily in Paris has been renewed for a second season at Netflix after a huge influx of watches on the series' first season.
This renewal comes in wake of French critics roasting the show for being an insipid look at their culture. The series favors French stereotypes over any sort of reality, which sparked some drama with the aforementioned international critics and led to the below statement from series creator Darren Star.
"The show is a love letter to Paris through the eyes of this American girl who has never been there. The first thing she is seeing is the clichés because it's from her point of view. I'm not sorry for looking at Paris through a glamorous lens. It's a beautiful city, and I wanted to do a show that celebrated that part of Paris."
The combination of lack of understanding from Star as to why French critics would be annoyed by the depiction of their country combined with vocal irritation from critics and fans alike led to viewers watching 676 million minutes of the series within its first week of release. (Nielson now releasing data on streamers gives us insight while, in the past, we merely had to assume the information Netflix was giving us was correct.)
Hate-watching has become a strange phenomenon among consumers. We saw the same thing lead to a renewal of HBO's The Vow very recently. Meanwhile, fan-favorites like GLOW, Santa Clarita Diet, etc. continue to get cancelled because they don't pull in the same number of viewers. It's an unfortunate trend, but one that we're in all the same.
Those hate-watches didn't account for all of the series' viewership. Some folks simply wanted to escape to a different country while being stuck at home for the fifth month in a row. Others were looking for something empty. Nothing wrong with either of those things!
Perhaps Season 2 of Emily in Paris will take the feedback from those actually engrossed in the culture and take its time to be respectful rather than empty.
