It’s shades of Emily in Paris for six young women who, if not sipping wine or striking a pose, are looking for love in the French capital
Concealing ranch dressing in your handbag, worrying about the carbs in la soupe, wondering if you’ll ever find a French lover who likes to Netflix and chill: here are just a few of the new world-old world challenges the protagonists face in the first episode of Real Girlfriends in Paris, a reality TV show with its debut on 6 September on Hayu and Bravo.
As one may presume from the title of the show, the programme follows six American women in their 20s and 30s, looking for meaning, for a change and, mostly, for love. As different as Anya Firestone, Emily Gorelik, Margaux Lignel, Kacey Margo, Adja Toure and Victoria Zito’s backgrounds are (respectively: a tour guide, a design management student, an aspiring entrepreneur, an English teacher, a Cornell graduate and a fashion designer), the one thing they have in common is their passion and monolithic vision of Paris. As the trailer’s voiceover points out, these nouvelles Parisiennes are adrift in “the most beautiful city in the world … a fairytale” – that is, an enchanted, heavily Disneyfied and filtered vision of France, which features the women performing Parisian-ness to a T: drinking wine round the clock, wearing trenchcoats and berets, eating crepes, loudly discussing sex. A choice of cliches so familiar and vivid that local press immediately labelled it “the reality TV version of Emily in Paris”, with French 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 hating” – for their glorious inaccuracy (Paris limited to a handful of bridges and mimes, emaciated women smoking in turtle necks, not to mention an entire alcoholic population).
