The Ugly Truth Behind JD Vance‘s ‘Emily in Paris’ Obsession

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Netflix JD Vance wants you to know that Emily in Paris —Netflix’s fluffiest expat export —is secretly “a massive cultural criticism of millennial decision-making.” His foolproof evidence? The titular character Emily Cooper, played by Lily Collins, is clearly making the wrong choice about her French chef love interest, Gabriel.

“She should marry this guy.

They should start a family, whether in Paris or America.

They should build a life together.

That’s what they should be doing,” he said in a clip that swiftly spread across TikTok and the political media .

But instead, as Vance lamented, Emily and Gabriel keep dating “a bunch of random people” and focusing on their jobs.

“It’s obvious,” he went on.

“Fall in love.

Get married.

You two were made for each other.” It’s a series of romantic near-misses, season after season—or what the vice president called, more or less, a case study in bad choices.

In his estimation, the show is a “masterwork… the best bit of cultural commentary—I would say cultural criticism— of my generation, the millennials.” All this Vance delivered with a straight face, punctuated, memorably, with the claim that Emily in Paris is “the Shakespeare of our time.” Short of Vance soft-launching a career pivot into television criticism, 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.

Let’s rewind to 2021, when Vance—then an Ohio Senate candidate and author of bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy —went on Tucker Carlson’s show and dismissed a cohort of Democratic leaders as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” Vance has since referred to that brash quip as “boneheaded.” And yet, he consistently returns to a similar thesis: that a woman’s choice to delay or refrain from marriage or motherhood in favor of a career (or for any other reason) is not just a personal call.

It’s a moral failing, and evidence that something is wrong with her, or at the very least with the culture that allowed her to make such a misguided choice.

Not only that, but according to Vance, such a choice, when made by our female political leaders, should be seen as an existential threat to our nation’s future.