This post contains spoilers for Emily in Paris Season four.
Years after staging the ultimate “will they or won’t they” television romance, the makers of Friends hinted that mistakes were made with Ross and Rachel. Not knowing their sitcom would run for a decade, the writers brought the characters together far too early in the show’s run, causing them to fall apart and Monica and Chandler to later be paired as a more stable yin to Ross and Rachel’s chaotic yang.
Watch the latest season of Emily in Paris, It became clear that this Netflix romantic comedy made the opposite mistake: it brought its own on-off couple together far too late. After three seasons Lily Collins‘s dubiously dressed American advertising woman Emily Pine over Lucas BravoIn season 4, the characters finally gave their smoldering romance a chance after teaming up with hot French chef Gabriel in the lead role. But just six episodes later, the flame was extinguished again and couldn’t be rekindled until the end of the season.
Series creator Darren Star is no stranger to a slowly developing love relationship. The triangle between YoungerLiza and her rival lovers Charles and Josh remained until the series finale, and Sex and the City was known for bringing the shenanigans of Carrie and Big from New York to Paris to the big screen. But the TV mogul has a problem with his latest series, which was not helped by Netflix’s decision to split the final season into two parts. Unsurprisingly, Emily in Paris does not have the story weight of Strange Things, or Bridgerton, to deserve such a gap.
Although the show’s writers have had three seasons to unravel what a relationship between Emily and Gabriel would entail, you still get the feeling that the show hasn’t quite figured out how to portray the two as a full-fledged couple when they get together in season four. The honeymoon period of their relationship is frustratingly short-lived (more scenes of Emily and Gabriel’s foreplay at his restaurant, please!), and conflict arises early on, thanks to the presence of Gabriel’s ex-girlfriend Camille (Camille Razat) who is carrying his child.
First, some juice has to be squeezed out of the dynamics of a group of three, which includes Emily, Gabriel, Camille and, at times, Camille’s Greek friend, Sofia (Melia Kreiling). “You’re cluttering up his apartment like a clown car,” Emily confides to her best friend Mindy (an always under-used Ashley Park), when the other couple settles into Gabriel’s house. But when Sofia leaves Camille in a fit of jealousy – and Camille learns that her pregnancy was a false diagnosis – the character begins to wear down Emily in Paris‘s entire escape operation.
COURTESY OF NETFLIX
To quote Emily’s favorite movie: The sound of my music: How do you solve a problem like Camille? She was once the amusing, cool French counterpart to our title character’s bumbling American, and her long love history with Gabriel proved a compelling obstacle for Emily. But now that Camille and Gabriel have decided to just be friends, and their unborn child never existed, there’s no reason for her to stay on the show.
Like Joel on The wonderful Mrs. Maisel or, God help us, Ellis on SmashCamille has overstayed her visit Emily in Paris. Armed with nothing but the promise of a pregnancy, she tries to hide the truth about the baby’s existence during a Christmas ski trip that Emily and Gabriel are on (yes, she’s doing a Terri Schuester on Joy). This betrayal, fortunately, lasts only one episode, but it ends Gabriel and Emily’s relationship. During the ski trip in question, Emily realizes that as long as Gabriel and Camille are a family, she will forever be the fifth wheel. But when Camille tells Gabriel that she lost the pregnancy (and conveniently neglects to mention that there was no baby to begin with), Gabriel finds other reasons to exclude Emily – namely his sudden anger at her inability to remember a word of French. Understandable, but where does it come from?
