JD Vance has found cultural greatness in an unexpected place: Netflix's frothy Emily in Paris. The vice president recently dubbed the show "the Shakespeare of our time" and "the masterwork of American television," arguing that beneath its couture and clichés lies sharp commentary on millennial life choices, the Telegraph reports.
Vance's "meta-analysis," as he called it, frames Lily Collins' Emily and her on-again, off-again French chef love interest as a case study in his generation's inability to commit, settle down, and prioritize family over career and novelty. Their "atrocious decisions," he said, amount to a criticism of millennial decision-making in an age of endless options and economic strain. That reading lands against a very different critical consensus: reviewers have long slammed the hit series as fluffy, unrealistic, and cliché-ridden, even as it heads into its sixth and final season with a devoted audience. The remarks also arrive as Vance is widely seen as positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run, where connecting with younger, especially female, voters could be key.
Not surprisingly, reaction to Vance's comments, which he aired in a TikTok video, included some skepticism. HuffPost's headline: "JD Vance Just Likened 'Emily In Paris' To What?!?" At Yahoo News, Lara Brown wonders if Vance has never heard of the "will they or won't they" sitcom trope. And at the Daily Beast, Grace Kelleher puts forward this hypothesis: "What the vice president is really doing is taking an idea he'd get heat for stating plainly (young women should stop building careers and casually dating, and just get married already) and laundering it through a show that nobody defends on artistic merit."
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