What If Emily Never Left Chicago?
Let's play a little game of alternate television universes.
The fifth season of Emily in Paris just dropped, and Emily has officially traded Paris for Rome. But somewhere between the outfit montages and romantic chaos, I found myself thinking about the first few minutes of the pilot. Before the glamorous relocations, Emily Cooper was just a marketing executive in Chicago. Brunette. Ambitious. Slightly out of sync with the people around her. The kind of person who means well but somehow turns every situation into a bigger situation. And if we're being honest, that version of Emily might have been the most entertaining one of all.
If Emily in Paris had simply become Emily in Chicago, here's exactly how I think it would have gone:
→ The 3% Service Fee Crisis: Emily would absolutely spiral over an unexpected restaurant surcharge. She would politely question it, become progressively less polite, and eventually storm out to rant about it to an attractive chef neighbor who somehow had a deeply personal opinion about local business economics.
→ The Neighborhood Hat Era: At some point she would start wearing one of those aggressively local trucker hats with the city's name plastered across the front. She would insist it was ironic. Nobody would believe her.
→ Luxury Condo Feminism: Emily would create an award-winning campaign for a luxury apartment development while posting infographics about community empowerment on Instagram, completely missing the contradiction unfolding in real time.
→ The Pizza Queue Incident: Despite living in a city where waiting in line is practically offensive, she'd stand outside a trendy imported pizza spot for two hours because TikTok told her to. A stranger would publicly roast her for paying forty dollars for a slice. She would secretly agree with him.
→ The Architecture Tour Disaster: No version of Emily exists where she completes a scenic river cruise without accidentally falling into the water. The only question is whether she'd save her phone first.
And obviously there would be a St. Patrick's Day episode.
A man in a green jersey would spill neon beer all over her carefully planned outfit. Someone would yell something unintelligible. Emily would try turning it into a networking opportunity. By the end of the night she'd somehow have a new client, an existential crisis, and a situationship.
Because regardless of the city, that's Emily's real superpower. She stumbles into chaos with alarming consistency and somehow lands on her feet wearing an outfit nobody else could pull off.
Would she have survived a Chicago winter? Honestly, I'm not convinced. But I do think we'd have watched every second of it.