Since its premiere in late 2020, the popular Netflix series about an American 20-something who moves to Paris for an unexpected job opportunity has spawned a backlash among the French, who complain that it portrays them as nasty, haughty and lazy while projecting Paris as an urban fantasyland filled with luridly-colored berets, serial philanderers and malevolent waiters.

When Season 3 was released in late December, Le Monde, the influential French newspaper, published a cri de coeur, sniping, “It is time to consider at least one season of Emily Away from Paris.” Writing last week in the left-leaning French newspaper Libération, David Belliard, the deputy mayor of Paris, railed against the show’s “Disneyland Paris, which is confined to the districts of the ultra-center and is inhabited only by the richest people.”

Like Emily Cooper, Rebecca Leffler moved to Paris in her 20s, and worked in a luxury division within Publicis Groupe, the French advertising company. While she recognized that Emily’s chronic bumbling was a necessary narrative conceit, Leffler said she was nevertheless irked by Season 3 because Emily always seemed to get what she wanted — haute couture, handsome men, business wins — while never seeming to encounter the harsh realities she had, like French bureaucracy, spiraling rents and gnawing homesickness.

But the worst was this –

Pritchard, a Virginia native, said her weekly pilgrimage to Café de Flore, where Simone de Beauvoir and Picasso once puffed and preached, had been ruined by the dozens of raucous “Emily in Paris” pilgrims who now swarmed the cafe, taking Instagram-ready selfies on one of the several 2-hour tours of Emily’s favorite Paris haunts, including her Fifth Arrondissement apartment. Some wear fire engine red berets, just like Emily.

Quelle horreur !  Juliet in Paris is off to investigate this.