Emily in Barcelona

In one of the most celebrated episodes of the first season of Sex and the City (Valley of the Twenty-Something Guys), Charlotte York calls her friend Carrie Bradshaw upset because a perfect husband-to-be ("He had her big three; looks, manners, money," says Sarah Jessica Parker's mythical voice-over) has asked her to practice anal sex. Carrie had to have a cocktail with Mr. Big, but she quickly changes her plans to pick up her friend in a taxi and, in a wonderfully conceived scene, Darren Star and screenwriter Michael Patrick King add the women of the mythical quartet to a debate inside the vehicle. Charlotte York disguises herself as a Foucaultian to remind her that if she gives in, there will be a before and after ("If he goes up, there's gonna be a shift in power"), and the great Samantha Jones closes the matter by appealing to crude biology: "Front, back, Who cares? A hole is a hole."

In 1998, when HBO premiered the episode and the series was not yet a mass phenomenon, the fact that four women openly discussed anal sex was not a taboo in the Western cinematic imagination. It was, however, that a group of females could grant themselves the power (and have enough money) to stop the time of the most dizzying city on the planet in order to organize an impromptu symposium on how a dick could affect their corporeality. Sex and the City founded its narrative on idealized clichés of life in Manhattan, starting with a protagonist who lived like a queen earning the salary of a simple newspaper column and a group of friends with very forced archetypes. But Star had the grace to explain that a city is also the idealization one makes of it and that female liberation, far from annihilating prejudice, should embrace it to modify it and thus have fun with a certain wit.

As almost always happens, Star did not invent the wheel; his superb creation regurgitated Jane Austen's novelistic style, according to which freedom is a rare unknown found in the space between the highest idealistic nativity and adaptation to the conventions and clichés of each era. As much as Sex and the City ended up causing a lot of silliness and tons of posh girls trying to imitate Carrie Bradshaw without her charm, the series normalized the taboo about certain sexual perversions by liberating them in the mouths of a protagonist quartet that helped keep the clichés of New York happiness intact before alternative screenwriters made them explode by erasing the Twin Towers from their horizon. When I landed in New York in 2004, there was no longer room for Carrie's Manolos because my fellow citizens were addicted to the ravings of a group of survivors on a strange island.

Indeed, Lost perfectly explained the emergence of a world in which even in the most paradisiacal lands we have enemies, where otherness is suspicious and, ultimately, where things are not such that one can spend time talking about anal penetration in a taxi on the way to Madison Avenue. All subsequent television narrative has tried to assume this trauma of the beginning of the 21st century in the New York attacks, which makes it even more interesting that Star has doubled down with a series of childish and positive spirit like Emily in Paris. If you ask any culture snob, the standard answer about this new television product that tells the arrival of a young Yankee in the French capital and her problems importing Chicago marketing and social media techniques into the traditional company Savoir is the same: "it's so bad you can't stop watching it in one sitting."

As always, the snobs miss the mark, because Star is smarter than bread and has once again understood very well where we are and how to translate the zeitgeist of the post-pandemic world. It's true, Emily in Paris revels in clichés about Yankee culture (spontaneity, anthropological optimism, modesty, etc.) in a very childish way, and its postcard-like portrayal of the city and the prototypical Parisian characters, from the unfriendly croissant seller to the antiquatedly seductive perfume inventor, produces a certain vicarious embarrassment. But the producer knows very well what he's doing and maliciously portrays the agony of French clichés and social customs and how a young woman with a capitalist spirit can end up reforming them by playing dumb but, ultimately, imposing her way of seeing the world. Emily is a small survivor in a city of mummies, indeed; but that's what our freedom is about, for now.

The choice is even more malicious if we consider that Star has chosen as the new diva of the Apocalypse the splendid Lily Collins, an actress who has experienced firsthand the excesses and delusions of consumer society. Her liberation is not very sexual (she ends up sleeping with whoever she wants, even if it doesn't quite work out), because Star understands very well that her heroine's subjective struggle is based on surviving in a cardboard city that is slowly falling apart without losing her furious little smile and, finally, on the task of getting ahead with her job. If I were a scriptwriter for a television station of our tribe, I would not hesitate to steal Star's idea and invent an Emily in Barcelona. This would not only normalize the clichés with which Catalonia and Barcelona are sold to the world (preferably better than Woody Allen), but it would also give clues to our young people on how to survive in our tedious city.

I know my plea is childish and unrealistic. For a long time now, those responsible for our television stations, and the governmental bodies that audit them, not only have no damn idea how television narrative works, but they don't even watch television. We will continue with Netflix, then; what else can we do.