The Olympics may be over, but the kitschy Parisian fun has only just begun, heralded by the arrival of the fourth season of Netflix’s unstoppably silly, occasionally chic Emily in Paris.

Given Netflix’s recent penchant for breaking its seasons into segments, this is only part 1 of the new episode, suggesting there’s a lot more to come for love-strapped influencer Emily Cooper and her endless parade of European boyfriends and sassy French colleagues. And that’s a good thing, because not much seems to happen in the first five episodes of the season.

Four seasons in, Emily in Paris is aware of the uproar. To be clear, this show, despite its Darren Star lineage, was never particularly Good. It’s funny, cheesy and novel, with a sophisticated setting and the requisite amount of antics and misunderstandings you’d expect from a half-hour comedy series, but by this point you’d think our characters would have moved on in their lives.

I’m not talking about settling down and starting families, although that is one of the many subplots this season. I’m just saying that little has changed since the first episode of the first season. The characters move through the scenery in each new episode like flat paper dolls being tipped from one end of a page to the other. The “shocks,” if they are shocks, have become predictable and the archetypal cast of characters has become frustrating.

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Nonetheless, the first half of season four does have a plot, and it’s just as entertaining as anything else the show has come up with.

Emily (Lily Collins) and her boyfriend, banker Alfie (Lucien Laviscount), are on a break after the events of the explosive third season finale, which is not a wedding between chef Gabriel (Lucas Bravo) and Camille (Camille Razat). Camille is pregnant by Gabriel and keeps the baby, although she does not want a relationship with him. She eventually disappears in the early episodes while sorting out her feelings.

Emily and Gabriel continue to flirt, but Emily is determined not to fall into that trap again: things between them are getting too complicated too quickly. Emily and Alfie, on the other hand, are equally disappointed when they discover that they are the new faces of Grateau’s latest marketing client and that their nonexistent relationship is emblazoned on billboards all over town. Emily’s best friend Mindy (Ashley Park) has entered the Eurovision Song Contest and, despite her rich boyfriend, she is struggling to raise the money for the necessary pyrotechnics.

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That’s a lot, but it’s also kind of trivial, and the show’s casual “everything’s fine” tone makes it seem doubly so the more these unfortunately intertwined people manage to manipulate each other’s lives. Any time a character hits a high, you know there’s going to be a low at the end of the episode, so what’s the point of enjoying it all? On this show, no one can touch another person without a third person peeking through the crack in the door and feeling bad about it.

The show’s only goal seems to be to keep doing what remains interesting, and it seems to believe that the only interesting thing is to keep messing up the love quadrangle between Emily, her boring boyfriend, her soulmate the chef, and the soulmate the chef’s mopey ex. Even occasional appearances by the enfant terrible The couture designer played by Jeremy O. Harris adds just a tiny spark of excitement to the show.

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The only really exciting storyline so far this season involves Emily’s boss Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), who is suffering from the stress of juggling her former flame, famous perfumer Antoine (William Abadie), and the demanding owner of a luxury fashion company whose behavior could be a little problematic. Their scenes, as always, feel like they’re part of another, more mature show for real adults – one that makes the rest of the series special. Emily in Paris looks like cocomelon.

The best reason to keep watching is really all the crazy outfits Lily Collins is wearing this time around, and this season actually has its highlights, including an incredible royal blue costume and a black and white striped masquerade ball outfit with a giant hat.

I don’t pretend to know anything about fashion, and I’m certainly not going to learn anything from this particular show, but it’s always fun to see the costume department go all out on something like this when other shows dress their cast in a sea of ​​crewneck sweaters and black pants. Emily in Paris never fit the mold of streaming television and I only wish the scripts were as daring and sensitive.