CCarrying a ranch in your handbag, worrying about the carbs in it soupwondering if you’ll ever find a French lover who likes to Netflix and chill: here are just some of the new old world challenges the protagonists face in the first episode of Real Girlfriends in Paris, a reality TV show with debuting on September 6 on Hayu and Bravo.
As one might assume from the show’s title, the program follows six American women in their 20s and 30s in search of meaning, change and, above all, love. As diverse as Anya Firestone, Emily Gorelik, Margaux Lignel, Kacey Margo, Adja Toure, and Victoria Zito are the backgrounds (respectively: a tour guide, a design management student, an aspiring entrepreneur, an English teacher, a Cornell graduate, and a designer), the only thing they have in common is their passion and monolithic vision for Paris. As the trailer voiceover indicates, these Parisian news are haunted by “the most beautiful city in the world … a fairy tale” – that is, an enchanted, highly disillusioned and filtered vision of France, which features women performing Parisian to a T: drinking wine around the clock, wearing a jacket. and berets, eating crepes, loudly discussing sex. A selection of clichés so familiar and vivid that the local press immediately labeled it “the reality TV version of Emily in Paris”, with France’s Elle declaring it “directly inspired” by Darren Star’s comedy drama. What do the two have in common? Both shows are seen, by the French media, as a “guilty pleasure” that “one loves to hate” – for their glorious inaccuracy (Paris confined to a handful of bridges and mimes, haggard women smoking on the necks of turtles, not to mention an entire alcoholic population).
One thing’s for sure: Real Girlfriends in Paris, in production for a third season, closely follows the well-trodden path of an old fantasy, updated for the Instagram age by Star. Locations for Emily in Paris are listed on Google Maps and marked in city guides. They have become sought-after selfie spots for tourists and locals alike – “I feel like a tourist in my own city,” confessed Alicia, 18, a fan of the show who grew up in Paris. The clothes featured in the show, and documented on multiple Instagram accounts, are seeing increasing sales. Not to mention the peak of US-origin tourism to France this summer – one togetherïincidence?
Real Girlfriends in Paris and Emily in Paris illuminate a longstanding Francophilia in American cinema and entertainment – from An American in Paris to Moulin Rouge, Sex and the City, Midnight in Paris and, most recently, The French Dispatch. It’s a fascinating subject that has led to dedicated books (Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination, edited by Laura Lee Downs and Stéphane Gerson), a host of podcasts and even standup appearances.
For historian Robert O Paxton, the immigrant experience offers something of a “mid-Atlantic identity,” hovering somewhere between two cultures but maintaining a critical distance from both. “It enabled me to move freely in both European and American space without ever being confined to either,” he writes.
The transition between worn or broken clichés, familiar benefits and new experiences is what many women describe when moving to perhaps the most cinematic and portrayed cities. Breckyn, a 32-year-old dancer and choreographer who moved to Paris last November from New York, remembers America seeing the French capital as the sum of “a glittering Eiffel Tower, film noir, sensuality, soft, romantic, the city of lights. – but you have to be ready for a really aggressive energy, like in most big cities.”
However, she moved for “higher living conditions, a healthier, better, healthier lifestyle, where travel is affordable and also culturally acceptable,” unlike New York where “hustling is the norm in a society based on fear … where everything feels like a war,” she says. However, what she values today is the multicultural dimension, “everything you don’t see in clichés, diversity in cultures, perspectives.” She adds that he was surprised to find “people willing to debate, argue, fight over a topic and remain friends.”
In addition to a more balanced life, it is also the promise of love, side by side with savoir-vivre, that attracts others. Hyo, 37, a student at Paris Business School who also moved from New York in July, says she has always been fascinated by “culture and music, which seems to have a special philosophical depth.” listing singer Tallisker and electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre. She is “eager to find love and definitely in French men, who are more romantic, elegant, deep and can have real discussions and live in the present”.
Going from cliché to reality is also the challenge facing Shawn, a 36-year-old entrepreneur from New York. “Friends often say, ‘Your life feels like Emily in Paris, going out drinking or going to amazing restaurants,’ but no place is perfect and the show isn’t supposed to be seen as anything but a fantasy,” she says, after revealing among other things the difficulty of the French bureaucracy and the daily reality.
These, together with the political complexity and dog excrementcertainly less likely to appear in Emily’s or Real Girlfriends’ Paris, centered around the Pont Neuf, free health care and French men.
Et pourquoi pas? However, the country’s multicultural history, landscape and rich cultural productions beyond the Periphery may be worth a dig for these new TV heroines.
