Pop Style Opinionfest: Hate-Watching “Emily in Paris” and Mourning “GLOW”

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Damn, why is everyone so mad at Emily in Paris? And what does that have to do with the late, lamented GLOW? Well, we’ll spend exactly 41 minutes telling you this week; a ramble that touches on all of the reasons why Lily Collins’ new show is both the perfect hate-watch, a harmless confection, and also shockingly tonally wrong for the current moment. It’s a throwback to a certain style of television that should, by all rights be completely out of style in 2020, and while we won’t necessarily bend over backwards defending it (although Lorenzo gets a little salty about the backlash), we will note why the backlash is a lot less angry than it appears and how it might also be a good thing for the – highly successful, we might add – show to lean into for its inevitable second season. It’s the perfect hate-watch, for perfectly 2020 reasons.

And it makes a perfect launching point for a discussion on the major disappointment of the week, Netflix’s abrupt and unexpected cancellation of GLOW. What does it say about the current moment that a show like Emily in Paris can be the most popular show on Netflix on the same week a show like GLOW gets cut loose without warning? To be fair, as much as we’d like to, it’s difficult to connect the two, even if they’re both Neflix shows with female leads and they’re both, in their different ways, at the mercy of the fucked-upedness of 2020.

Whew! That sounds heady, but we swear it’s just another of our semi-pleasant rambles about the state of the culture as we see it. Thanks for listening, dolls!

[Photo Credit: Netflix]

• Betty Gilpin
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