The American girl, Emily is a story of an American perspective in a French setting, as is constantly reiterated by Emily, who comes off as a sweet, highly optimisted girl who just recently got this new role in Paris after her Chicago boss who was supposed to be in this position, got pregnant.
Our girl in the beret, chic and colorful outfits finds herself in Paris with the eyes of a tourist, life of a social media Influencer, and official job as a marketer/promoter. Everything I've read about this series is true, namely the clichés, the French stereotypes, the predictability of it all, and extremely lighthightedness and fun that it is to watch. There's nothing heavy here to leave you in suspense as it carries you along in a calm rhythm of romance and many wins.
Emily arrives in Paris and encounters her first lesson in the form of the way the French refer to their ground floors. She lives on the fifth floor and struggles to grasp the concept of the first floor coming after the ground floor. This mistake leads her to opening the door a few times to the fourth floor (no one locks in Paris, we assume) where coincidentally, a handsome neighbor who speaks English and works as a chef in a Cafe downstairs lives. Her first crush-romance is sure to begin. Cliché number one.
More of Emily's troubles begin in her French office where she's not made to feel welcome because everything is wrong with the way Americans do things. From their work ethic (they live to work) to their weight and diet, and non desire to smoke at every opportunity, to the way they want to offer suggestions at work, to the way they come early and their sex lives. It's all a bickering lot to take because the French apparently are not like the Chinese who say things behind your back. No, the French will call you a basic bitch to your face.
Emily however has fantastic ideas, and although they bring major wins for this agency, it does very little to warm the heart of her tigress boss who is having an affair with one of their clients. Affairs are a French way of life and we very quickly move past the morality of it all and adopt a very French outlook to allow for this necessity.
We find Emily warming up to different men who fancy her and who she fancies. We might think that French men are flirtatious and are even told in this series that the only thing French men can do for hours is have sex, but Emily is one flirtatious girl who gulps all of that attention and there's really no one she doesn't end up in bed with after a little flirtatious talk. Not even the 17 year old brother of a new friend Camille, was off limits in this series . Disclaimer:she did not know he was 17 at that time and the way he talked about wines was very sexy. Um. Okay.
We move past this very quickly even though I thought the American way would be to find this very outrageous, but the series doesn't seem to know where it stands on this matter, so we move along very quickly back to business.
More clients come her way and it's always a war up till the end of this series to wean the French people she meets off their set ways of doing things and to try something more millennial and American. She succeeds as always after a bit of a struggle and wears her super hero cape.
Is this a series that tries to make the American way trump over other ways? I can see why a French audience would kick against it and find it annoying in many ways, but for a world that is very dominated by American culture, it might be strange if you're part of an audience who's been influenced by that culture to see so much resistance to the 'American perspective'.
That being said, the love triangles in this series were left as an unfinished business but season two should hopefully bring the pieces together. Or not.