9 Glaring “Emily In Paris” Plot Holes We Ignore Because We Genuinely Don’t Care

It’s hard to explain Emily In Paris to someone who hasn’t seen it. There’s no character development, most characters are annoying, and the acting is abysmal – yet I’m obsessed. From the drama to the panoramic scenes of Paris (and Rome this season), it’s the perfect show if you want an escape from reality…even if the show is full of plot holes.

Are the plot holes annoying? Yes. Do we care and let it ruin our viewing experience? Absolutely not.

Spoilers for all four seasons are ahead.

1. The Season Four Timeline

Because of the 2023 Hollywood Writers’ Strike, fans had to wait a while for season four of Emily In Paris, but the events of the season three finale and the season four premiere take place only days apart. This inevitably causes issues with the timeline. The fourth season kicks off with Emily attending the French Open, which always takes place in late May. This doesn’t add up because they celebrated Fête de la Musique during the season three finale, which takes place in June.

To add insult to injury, it's suddenly Christmas in the sixth episode, and nobody has noticed that Camille doesn't actually look pregnant at all. All of these issues together could mean two things: Either Emily is a time traveler, or the writers of the show have as much self-awareness as Emily herself. Our money is on the latter.

2. Emily’s Finances

Fictional characters living above their means is nothing new. None of us know how Carrie Bradshaw could afford her glamorous apartment while writing a weekly column, or how Rachel and Monica could afford their apartment in the early seasons of Friends while Rachel worked as a waitress and Monica as a sous chef.

Emily In Paris takes this to another level. Emily wears couture while working as a marketing executive, and you don’t have to be an accountant to know that doesn’t add up. According to our analysis, Emily likely makes $82,620 a year with her jobs in marketing and influencing, but her lifestyle (which includes spending likely over $75k on clothing per year) doesn’t match her salary. In fact, she’d probably be drowning in debt. While the show isn’t supposed to be realistic (and we love how out-of-pocket the show can be), Game of Thrones is more believable than this.

3. Massive Problems Are Solved Unrealistically Fast

The third season finale ended with a couple of cliffhangers. Gabriel and Camille are about to get married, but Camille confesses she knows Gabriel is in love with Emily before walking out of the wedding, and Alfie calls Emily a cheater. To make things worse, Camille is pregnant (we later found out she experienced a false pregnancy) with Gabriel’s baby, and she’s having an affair with a Greek woman named Sofia. Are you lost? We are too.

This amount of drama is enough to provide several plotlines for the fourth season, but all of these problems are resolved within the first few episodes. Camille runs off but forgives Emily when she finds her and apologizes. Gabriel is totally fine with the mother of his child having an affair with another woman and allowing her to move into their apartment. Alfie seemingly forgets Emily broke his heart. And did we mention that this is all solved in a couple of days? We get that this show is supposed to be overdramatic and that they want to introduce new storylines, but this is the stuff that telenovelas are made of. Why not let this drama last for a few more episodes?

4. Madeline’s Pregnancy

Emily initially heads to Paris in the first season because her boss, Madeline, finds out she’s pregnant and can no longer make the commitment to working in Paris for a year. Near the end of the second season, Madeline travels to Paris to help with a project, where she gives birth to her baby at the beginning of season three. She stays in Paris after giving birth, which makes no sense because her pregnancy supposedly prevented her from going to Paris in the first place.

These seasons were filmed over a few years, and there was a gap between filming the first and the second season due to the coronavirus pandemic, likely making the timeline longer than the showrunners initially planned. Creator Darren Star weighed in on the timeline controversy by telling Glamour, “Our seasons are not nine months long.” While you could argue that this is valid because some shows have seasons that take place over a few weeks and some over several years, this is just another example of the recurring timeline issue the show has.

5. Benoit’s Disappearing Act

Mindy starts dating Benoit in the second season after they start a band together, and it’s safe to say they’re an adorable couple. They break up in the third season before she starts dating Nicolas, but Benoit comes back at the end to tell her their band qualified to represent France on Eurovision. Eurovision is a plotline for the first two episodes of the fourth season because Mindy struggles to pay for it with her own money, but they don’t mention it again until the sixth episode.

Mindy and Benoit sing a romantic duet together, leading some to believe they’re still dating, making Nicolas jealous and eventually contributing to their breakup. What’s odd is that Benoit is not a consistent character – he’s in an episode and then disappears for several. Despite the chemistry that he has with Mindy (and how he clearly still has feelings for her), they don’t get back together after she and Nicolas break up, leading fans to wonder why he was even there in the first place. #JusticeforBenoit

6. Camille’s Multiple Personalities

When we first meet Camille, she’s a breath of fresh air because she’s the first French person besides Gabriel to be kind to Emily. Things get messy when we learn that she’s not only Gabriel’s girlfriend but lives with him. The drama continues as the love triangle does, and Camille seems to change.

We get it, getting cheated on can make any woman go crazy, but Camille becomes outright cruel when she exposes the affair and later on when she doesn’t condemn her brother for making a TikTok about Emily. To make things more confusing, she’s back to her usual kind self at the end of season four.

7. Julien’s Job Change

One of the many cliffhangers from the end of the third season was whether or not Julien would stay at his job at Agence Grateau or move to work at JVMA. We learn that he takes the job with JVMA and starts working with them immediately. According to TikToker @iamsoldana, this doesn’t line up with French corporate culture. “The next day, he is already at JVMA doing his onboarding and starting the job,” she says. “Do you want to know what the legal minimum notice you have to give your company in France before you leave? It’s three months.” 

We can see why they didn’t make this realistic, as Julien only works at JVMA for a couple of weeks before he goes back to Sylvie after his new boss asks for dirt on her. That would’ve added six months (because he’d have to give notice to JVMA too) to this already unrealistic timeline, and we don’t have time for that.

8. Mindy and Nicolas’ Relationship 

Mindy is so much more than Emily’s quirky best friend. When we first meet her in season one, we learn that she’s a Chinese heiress who has been cut off from her father because she left business school to pursue a career in music. She wants to prove to him that she doesn’t need his money and can make it on her own, and she does a good job proving it until the middle of season three, when she starts dating an old friend from boarding school, Nicolas. Like her, Nicolas grew up wealthy, but he takes advantage of the lifestyle that his father’s money has to offer. 

We get it, Nicolas is super hot and rich, but that’s all he seems to offer because he doesn’t have much of a personality at all. She seems to want to be with him because he’s hot and has money, which is the complete antithesis of the character we met in the first season.

9. Julien’s Spanish Boyfriend

In the sixth episode, Julien tells his coworkers about his Spanish hookup who’s coming to Paris for Christmas. He brings him as a date to Mindy’s Christmas party and expresses discomfort that his hookup wants something more, and the storyline ends there. It’s so brief that I not only forgot his hookup’s name, but I didn’t bother to look it up. What was the purpose of including this if they weren’t going to explore the possibility of a relationship? It’s also done poorly, as it’s never mentioned again, not even in passing. 

What’s annoying about this is that Emily’s coworkers (Sylvie, Luc, and Julien) and Mindy are easily the most entertaining and compelling characters on the show, and fans would have loved to see more of Julien. If this isn’t a missed opportunity for character growth and some drama, we don’t know what is.

Closing Thoughts

Emily In Paris may never win an Emmy, heck it may never even make sense to us, but that doesn’t stop us from watching and rewatching every scene. Even with the numerous plot holes and character issues, it will always be our comfort show.