Emily In Paris Season 5 Review: A Luxury Ad Disguised As A Rom-Com

Some shows demand your full attention, others politely ask you to keep one eye on your phone. Emily in Paris has always belonged to the latter category: glossy, noisy, absurdly dressed comfort television that hums along like background music to a very specific fantasy. 

By the time its fifth season arrives, freshly stamped with a Rome address and a new haircut for its eternally perky protagonist, the series knows exactly what it is and, perhaps more importantly, what it has no intention of becoming.

Season five opens with a soft rebranding. Paris, once the beating heart of the show, is nudged aside as Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) relocates to Rome to head the Italian outpost of Agence Grateau. 

The move is framed as both a professional step forward and a personal reset, even if the series' famously short memory makes it difficult to recall why certain emotional messes existed in the first place. 

Emily arrives armed with pastel power suits, unwavering optimism and the same unshakeable belief that every life problem can be solved with the right marketing pitch. 

Rome, in turn, is presented less as a lived-in city and more as a postcard come to life - sun-drenched piazzas, glossy hotel terraces, plates of pasta shot with reverence and enough luxury branding to rival a fashion week front row.

Professionally, Emily is now running the Rome office, proving that a French firm can hold its own against Italian powerhouses. Her boss Sylvie (the reliably magnetic Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) remains her most formidable ally and occasional antagonist, while Luc (Bruno Gouery) and Julien (Samuel Arnold) orbit the chaos with varying degrees of competence and questionable judgment. 

The show continues to frame work not as work, exactly, but as a social performance: business meetings double as cocktail parties, clients become lovers, and every crisis exists mainly to set up a clever social-media campaign. 

Emily's greatest professional asset remains her uncanny ability to stumble into solutions - whether that involves pitching luxury brands through personal anecdotes, or rubbing hamburger meat on her hands to attract a dog whose owner happens to be influential.

Romantically, the season places Italian businessman Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini) front and centre. Tall, charming and steeped in national stereotypes, he represents both Emily's new life and her old habits. 

Their relationship unfolds through truffle hunts, family dinners and escalating business entanglements, particularly with his cashmere empire and his formidable mother. Marcello is sincere, affectionate and - crucially - useful to Emily's career, which makes their romance feel both earnest and transactional in the way Emily in Paris so often blurs. 

Gabriel (Lucas Bravo), the long-running emotional complication, refuses to disappear entirely. Despite achieving professional success of his own, his lingering presence underscores one of the show's central frustrations: Emily may change cities, offices and wardrobes, but her emotional patterns remain stubbornly intact.

Mindy (Ashley Park), Emily's best friend and constant cheerleader, continues to float between ambition and instability. Once again, she finds herself entangled in romantic chaos, questionable decisions and multiple musical performances that stop the narrative in its tracks. 

Whether these moments feel joyful or indulgent depends entirely on one's tolerance for spectacle over story, but they undeniably reinforce the series' commitment to excess. Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) re-enters the orbit as well, triggering a flirtation that knowingly breaks every rule of friendship etiquette and briefly injects emotional tension before the plot swiftly moves on.

Season five also introduces one of its most effective new characters in Minnie Driver's Princess Jane, a cash-strapped influencer who married into Italian royalty and now funds her lavish lifestyle through relentless, painfully tacky sponsored content. 

Her presence sharpens the show's most honest impulse: an occasional acknowledgement that the world Emily inhabits is ridiculous, transactional and absurd. Unfortunately, these flashes of self-awareness are fleeting, quickly swallowed by the series' larger fantasy.

Thematically, the season circles familiar ground. Everyone is dating everyone else, often simultaneously, often disastrously, and rarely with lasting consequences. Business and pleasure remain disastrously intertwined, yet the show treats this not as a cautionary tale but as a lifestyle choice. 

Conflicts arise rapidly and resolve just as quickly, frequently through misunderstandings that could be solved with a single conversation. Character growth is suggested through haircuts, job titles and new cities rather than through meaningful emotional change. 

Emily herself remains a paradox: hyper-competent yet naïve, endlessly supportive yet self-centred, perpetually learning lessons she seems destined to forget.

Visually, the series remains as seductive as ever. The fashion is less aggressively eccentric than earlier seasons but still aspirational, with Emily's wardrobe functioning as both armour and identity. 

Rome is filmed as a luxury brochure, its grit and complexity smoothed away in favour of beauty shots and brand-friendly backdrops. At times, the show feels less like a narrative and more like an extended advertisement for high-end labels, five-star hotels and late-capitalist fantasies of work-life collapse.

And yet, despite all its flaws, or perhaps because of them, Emily in Paris remains compulsively watchable. The episodes are short, the pacing relentless, and the stakes low enough to never feel burdensome. Even when the writing feels thin, the performances remain buoyant. 

By the end of season five, Emily stands in a familiar place despite the Roman setting. Her life is still unresolved, her choices still questionable, her future still framed around whom she might date next rather than who she might become. 

The series closes not with answers, but with the promise of more of the same - more cities, more outfits, more love triangles looping endlessly back on themselves. 

Emily in Paris may be running low on narrative innovation, but as long as viewers are willing to switch their brains off and bask in its glossy unreality, it continues to deliver exactly what it promises: a sparkling, shallow escape that knows its own absurdity, even if it rarely dares to confront it. On soupire, on sourit, et on regarde quand meme. Merci beaucoup, Emily. (We sigh, we smile, and we watch anyway).