The Escapism of Girly Shows

I will be honest: I love me some Emily in Paris. Right now I am deep into Elle too, that high-gloss, leggy fever dream that is unfortunately a bit too woke for me, but my Millennial upbringing has me glued to the screen. Millennial women who grew up practicing courtroom monologues in the bathroom mirror while quoting “What, like it’s hard?”—this is our official reunion tour. And apparently we are not alone. Hell, even today’s vice president is out here watching Emily in Paris. When the second-most powerful person in the country is also mainlining the same frothy French fantasy, you know the show has officially transcended “problematic” and become pure cultural infrastructure. He is also a millennial, afterall…

Most nights my boyfriend and I do the responsible-couple thing: we pick a show “together.” Something dense and dramatic—plot twists we can unpack afterward like amateur therapists. It is intimate. It is grown-up. It is the relationship equivalent of a thoughtfully plated tasting menu. But every once in a while the craving hits hard: pure, unfiltered escapism. Not the heavy kind of craving that forces you to confront your own life choices. The frivolous kind that lets you clock out of reality entirely and live inside someone else’s carefully filtered chaos (something I am blamed for doing far too often). So he hands over the Netflix password like a soft-dom sugar daddy he can be and I disappear into a binge that demands zero emotional labor from either of us.

Emily in Paris supposedly blew up during the pandemic—when the entire planet was locked inside, starved for color, and desperate for anything that did not look like sweatpants and existential dread. The algorithm fed us that glossy Parisian candy like a collective coping mechanism. Fine. Whatever. I was not there for the quarantine comfort. It is not like I let some silly, little sickness take over my life! Instead, I got sucked in by the constant, unapologetic collision between American and European cultures…the wide-eyed hustle versus the practiced eye-roll, the “why not?” energy slamming into the “why would you ever?” attitude. That friction felt familiar as hell. I lived versions of it in real time: the moments my own optimistic, slightly chaotic American wiring collides with cooler, more restrained European mindsets and neither side is willing to fully surrender.

Obviously the fashion is its own controlled substance—outfits so aggressively styled, colors that refuse to apologize, accessories that scream “I woke up like this and still look richer than you.” But the real high, at least at first, is not just watching it alone. It is the after-party of telling him about every ridiculous plot point, every cultural micro-aggression, every look that made me want a beret collection. I map the show’s exaggerated culture wars onto my own experiences—the times I have been the loud American in a quieter room, the times I have watched someone side-eye my enthusiasm like it was a personal attack, the times fashion became armor or a middle finger. It turns passive binge-watching into this ongoing private conversation, half roast, half confession, and somehow more addictive than the show itself.

So yes—I take a few deliberate days every year to slip straight back into full girly-era mode. No apologies. No intellectual alibis. Just me, the algorithm, and an unapologetic dive into the pinkest, most over-the-top corners of television. Because sometimes the most rebellious thing you can do is refuse to grow out of the things that still make you feel electric.