After three seasons of ‘Emily in Paris,’ the City of Light might be starting to love Darren Star back

Emily is in Paris.

And so is Darren.

That was the thought that bubbled up this week after the third season release of a certain irresistible Netflix meringue, about the man behind it. Thinking back to a conversation I had sometime back with Darren Star — the showrunner who has had a chokehold on the pop culture conversation for more than 30 years — I remembered how he told me he had been a “French geek” when he was younger, studying the language in college and first bouncing around France during a backpacking trip when he was 19.

Returning any chance he could, as success (and money) found him over the many years, he went further when he rented an apartment in the Marais district about a decade ago, even taking French classes there (just like Emily does). Now, because of his latest show — which became a monster pandemic-time wanderlusty hit in 2020 when it debuted — he lives there for about four months of the year (working with a largely French crew) … and it begged to ask: how much is the kooky, overdressed millennial heroine of the show just an alter-ego of this 61-year-old Jewish dude?

It was the same question that podcast champ Kara Swisher had when she interviewed him the other week and to which he offered a fairly convincing answer.

“I feel like I’m Emily. I feel like I’m Carrie. I feel like I’m Brandon,” he said, alluding not only to the “Emily in Paris” linchpin, played by Lily Collins, but also the generation-defining mainstays of “Sex and the City” and “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

“I don’t feel like I’m Amanda,” he stressed, referring to the stop-at-nothing vixen famously made flesh by Heather Locklear in “Melrose Place.”

As for Paris … Darren may love it, but does it love him back? While his latest series may have been a daffy success right out of the gate — Season 1 ranked as the most viewed comedy on Netflix, topping the list in 52 countries, and Season 2, last year, was even bigger — the French, at least some, thought it was a horreur. Like many critics, they thought it was perhaps too cliched and ribbon-tied. Too aspirational? Too too?

Alas, a funny thing happened on the way to Season 3 (and all that success).

“I think the French went from actually semi-loathing it to secretly loving it to outright embracing it,” is what Star says now. Exhibit A: the global premiere held for the show the other week in the City of Light, when the cast took over a theatre on Avenue Montaigne. Because seasons 1 and 2 had come out when they did, it was the first proper celebration for the show in Paris itself and the response was deafening.

Fish out of water no more? That is what “Emily” herself promised, as Collins told reporters that “Emily this season is a little more grounded in herself, she’s quietly confident, she is a little bit more French.” As episodes crept out this week, it seemed like many were similarly in sync, The Wrap, for instance, raving that, “Just as Emily has figured herself out, the divisive show has done the same” and that “this is the best season yet.”

One criticism that Star definitely waves away? The idea that Paris is too beautiful in the series. “I have to say: Paris really does look that. It is not like we are using special effects.” He compares it to filming in New York when he was doing “SATC”: another naturally cinematic city. “You can point the camera anywhere.”

2022, alas, has been quite the year for the Maryland-raised boy (the son of an orthodontist). The one who was only 27 — with one screenplay to this name — when a then-fledgling Fox network invited him to pitch an idea that would become the first prime-time soap aimed at teens, turn a certain L.A. zip code into cultural currency and make Aaron Spelling his mentor. All those decades after “90210” had him not only launching this latest season of “Emily in Paris,” but also debuting yet another show earlier this year, “Uncoupled,” starring Neil Patrick Harris.

A more bittersweet conceit, the latter dramedy centred around a real estate broker in New York dealing with a breakup and dating again in the big city — the first Star series with gay men at the centre of it. This, after a conga line of sidekicks — characters, notably, like Matt Fielding (Doug Savant) in “Melrose Place,” who is remembered most for causing tons of controversy in the ’90s when a gay kiss was nixed from the show after advertisers balked.

A certain kind of catharsis then, for Star? You could say that. Though the showrunner comes back to the humanness of the characters in “Uncoupled,” first and foremost. Sooner or later, “someone has left someone or been left by someone,” he says.

“Reinvention.” The word, too — and theme — that comes up repeatedly when he is talking about his oeuvre. It is at the heart of all of it, including the series “Younger,” starring Sutton Foster and Hilary Duff, which wrapped recently after seven seasons. The reinvention there had to do with women of a certain age who had left the workplace to raise families and then had to finagle coming back into it.

Emily, likewise, has changed. Is changing. And yet the city of her makeover remains … well … constant. Paris is Paris, and thank God. Right, Darren?

“Im still not cynical about it,” he says.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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