would just leave Darren Star alone. In case you don’t know he created Sex and the City as well as Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. I am in lock-down desperation mode and will do anything to keep myself entertained, so I just found two recent Darren Star series that I didn’t know existed: Younger and the more recent Emily in Paris. It must be said that Darren Star is an excellent TV writer -- faint praise I know -- but considered in the context of the busloads of unfunny crap that’s out there, he gets a shitload of credit. But ever since Sex and the City went out of style he’s been getting very bad press. Of course Sex and the City was considered controversial at the time, but Lena Dunham 'out controversialed' him with Girls -- written by a woman and well frankly less 'consumerist' and more contemporary. All that said, I don’t think it’s fair to throw old Darren in the garburator quite yet. To do so (yes, I’m going to say it) is homophobic. He's a fag who writes about women, okay? Yes, it irks me that he doesn’t just write a bloody gay show, but let’s face it no one would watch it — unless the leading characters were friggin’ boring — they’d have to be deaf, married, raising an autistic son, and virtue signalling all over the place for the public to accept them. There would be no gay hook-up apps, shame, AIDS, sex in alleys, male prostitutes, butt plugs, or drugs. Though these are all still staples of gay culture, they are nevertheless unmentionable. So maybe this is why Darren has to write about middle class straight women. Or maybe he just wants to? But nowadays -- with appropriation -- you have to not only be what you write about but be authentic as hell to back it up. Okay, I get it. Darren Star is not a middle class straight woman, do I need to say it again? I get it, but people are being so mean and stupid about Emily in Paris. It is what it is -- very entertaining, but also thoughtful --and I’ll tell you why. I’m sure lots of women and gay men just love seeing Emily get it on with that hunky chef, she’s so adorable and very Audrey Hepburn, and her potential boyf is even more adorable and sensitive than her, and has already shown us his fab abs! Anyway, Emily is getting it from the uptight-puritan-frowning-critic-woke-folk because she just moved to Paris and doesn’t speak French. Duh. That is a central issue in the series for Chrissakes! It is the very focus of her conflict with her boss, and all the French people are quite rightly yelling at her about it. Secondly, the series is criticised for portraying French people as snotty and elitist about their culture. I don’t know how to tell you this but The French are snotty and elitist about their culture -- and Jesus, they have every right to be! Anglo culture just doesn’t measure up. We have Shakespeare but they have Rabelais, Proust, Hugo, Voltaire and Flaubert -- and they basically own modern philosophy. And what about the French feminists (Catherine Millet etc.)? And what about Michel Houellebecq —my favourite author in the world? You don’t have to convince me-- French people have every right to be stuck up -- anyway who cares if the show has something against French people (which it doesn’t)? Finally, the show is being criticized for being ‘consumerist.’ Criticized by critics on digital media. Well there is nothing more ‘consumerist’ than digital media. If you are making money writing for the web, then you are part of a vast corrupt plot to steal our data, and ultimately all our money, and most of all-- make money off our kids. So don’t lecture me about friggin’ consumerism Mr. Rotten Tomatoes Critic. So Emily likes to buy dresses. But who doesn’t? Now that I’m into the 4th episode I figured out why Darren Star chose to write about an American girl in Paris in 2020; it makes perfect sense to anyone with even half a brain. What all these idiot critics are ignoring is that Darren Star is valorising French culture and pillorying the puritanism of anglo culture; and he is absolutely right to do so. I can’t think of any other western culture that embraces the politics of pleasure like France. As one character says ‘you live to work, we work to live.’ Having spent a lot of time in Montreal (thank God they had a lock down protest last night — I hope they have five thousand more protests and start wrecking things!) I can tell you that Montreal is a culture of pleasure, and Toronto is a culture of work -- because Montreal is French and Toronto is English — and never the twain shall meet. But all this criticism of Emily in Paris comes down to something more significant than just woke stupidity, virtue signalling and political correctness (now just as ubiquitous as COVID-19). Emily in Paris is Darren Star’s experience of his own life right now. And yes, he imagines himself to be a pretty 24 year old in Paris; that is his artistic translation of his own experience into entertainment. You don’t have to like it, and you can certainly challenge it’s accuracy if you wish — I challenge the accuracy of gay representations all the time. But also recognise that Emily in Paris — like all art or even really good entertainment — is just someone saying: "this is the way I see it — and by ‘it,’ I mean — life!" This applies not just to art and good entertainment but to everything. In other words, this blog, and any review you read of Emily in Paris on Rotten Tomatoes, and anything you find in SLATE or SALON.com is simply someone’s translation of their own experience. It's not gospel and should not be treated as ‘the truth’ because nothing is. All writing and speech should be treated with skepticism, and that includes everything from Rex Murphy to Andrea Dworkin to Vivek Shraya to the latest TV analysis of COVID-19 and the latest Black Lives Matter pronouncement. We are all culpable, we are all liars, and everything that we produce in writing or speech should be viewed with deep critical suspicion and not accepted as the last word, or even merely the first word, as it might just be fictive crap. So listen guys, will you just leave Darren Star alone? Okay, so you can’t seem to imagine yourself as a beautiful Audrey Hepburnish young woman starting a new job in Paris -- falling in love with a hunky chef. Well, that’s your problem. Thank God, it’s not mine.
