For four seasons, the joke about Emily in Paris was the same joke. It’s beautiful. It’s shallow. Emily solves every problem in a great outfit. The French characters roll their eyes. Someone falls in love with her. Repeat.
Season 5 is the same show — and it isn’t. Not quite.
Emily in Paris Season 5 dropped on Netflix on December 18, 2025, all ten episodes at once. By January 2026, before most people had finished talking about it, Netflix renewed the show for a sixth season. And the conversation around Season 5 was noticeably different from any season before it — not because the show became something it wasn’t, but because moving Emily to Rome forced it to test whether the formula works without the formula’s most famous ingredient.
Spoiler: it mostly does.
Emily Is in Rome Now. Sort Of.
Season 4 ended with Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) being handed the Rome office of Agence Grateau — the Paris marketing firm that has been her professional home since Season 1. Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), her exacting boss and most complicated ally, made the offer. Emily took it.
Emily in Paris Season 5 picks up in Rome, where Emily is running the new office, managing a team she didn’t build, navigating clients she doesn’t know, and doing it all while split between two cities — because Paris keeps pulling her back.
Creator Darren Star made the geography very deliberate. He told Netflix’s Tudum: “This season tells a story across two cities: Rome and Paris.” Emily hasn’t changed her Instagram handle to Emily in Rome. She is still anchored to Paris — professionally, personally, and emotionally. But Rome changes the pressure. She’s not a fish out of water anymore. She’s a fish who learned to swim and got dropped in a different tank.
The new Rome-based cast members include Jonathan Cake and Bryan Greenberg, who play clients with competing agendas. Minnie Driver — Oscar-nominated, criminally underused in most projects she’s been in for the last decade — plays a princess who has reinvented herself as a social media influencer. That specific casting choice alone tells you that Darren Star is still paying attention to what is actually happening in the culture.
The Love Triangle, Again — But With New Geometry
Here is the thing about Gabriel (Lucas Bravo): Season 4 made him do something irreversible. He chose someone else. He hurt Emily. And then he watched her fall for Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini) — an Italian fashion heir with the kind of easy charm that makes you not trust him at first, then feel bad about not trusting him.
Emily in Paris Season 5 doesn’t pretend Gabriel’s choice didn’t happen. Star told The Hollywood Reporter plainly: “Emily and Gabriel aren’t happening now. Maybe later.” Collins added that Gabriel has to face the consequences of what he did. And Lily Collins is very good at playing the specific version of Emily who has moved on but not entirely — the version who is building something new while still glancing backward.
Marcello works better in Rome than he did in Paris. On his home ground, with his family’s businesses in the background and the city framing him correctly, the relationship feels grounded. It doesn’t feel like a vacation romance anymore. That distinction matters more than it sounds.
Mindy (Ashley Park) and Camille (Camille Razat) return, as does Julien (Samuel Arnold) and the rest of the core Paris ensemble. The show does not sacrifice its bench to make the Rome story work. It uses them.
What the New Cast Brings
Minnie Driver as a princess-turned-influencer is not a joke. She plays it like a real person — someone who found a way to be relevant again and is quietly terrified that it won’t last. Every scene she’s in has a specific edge under the surface, and that edge is what Emily in Paris has often lacked. The show can be very smooth. Driver is not smooth.
Michèle Laroque — one of France’s most celebrated comic actresses — joins as a new character who complicates the Paris side of Emily’s story. Her chemistry with Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu in the episodes that bring the two of them together is some of the sharpest writing the show has done.
What strikes me about Season 5’s new additions is how deliberately Darren Star cast people who bring specific weight to their scenes rather than just filling new-city quota. The Rome setting could have been an excuse to introduce a parade of beautiful strangers. Instead, it introduced Minnie Driver holding a phone like a weapon and Michèle Laroque giving Sylvie a proper adversary.
That is a meaningful upgrade.
The Season 6 Renewal and What It Says
Netflix greenlit Season 6 in January 2026 — barely a month after Season 5 dropped.
That turnaround is fast even by Netflix standards. It tells you that Season 5’s viewing numbers were strong and that the streaming platform sees the show as a reliable global asset rather than a domestic crowd-pleaser. Emily in Paris streams in over 190 countries. It is, whether critics are comfortable admitting it or not, one of Netflix’s most globally consistent performers — a show people in Seoul and São Paulo and Sydney watch for the same reason people in Chicago and London do: it is easy, beautiful, and reliably fun.
Emily in Paris Season 5 keeps the ending deliberately open on several fronts. The Gabriel thread is unresolved — Star’s “maybe later” quote was not accidental. The Rome office is growing but fragile. Emily has more stability than she has ever had and is clearly about to disrupt it herself, as she always does.
Emily in Paris Season 6 will likely pull her back toward Paris more forcefully. The title is still Emily in Paris, not Emily in Rome. The show hasn’t forgotten where it lives.
What the Show Gets Right That Nobody Admits
Critics have never fully warmed to Emily in Paris. The Rotten Tomatoes score hovers around 63% for Season 5. The audience score sits near 80%. That gap has been consistent across every season and tells you something real: the show is doing something critics tend to undervalue, which is giving people exactly what they came for.
Emily in Paris is not trying to be Succession. It is not trying to be The White Lotus. It is trying to be a warm, gorgeous, funny show about a woman who is good at her job, bad at love, and great at finding the right thing to wear when both of those things are happening at once.
Emily in Paris Season 5 earns that description. The Rome move gives it just enough friction to feel like the show is growing. The Minnie Driver casting gives it just enough edge to feel sharper than before. And the Season 6 renewal means there’s at least one more city left in Emily Cooper.
The eiffel Tower is still her lock screen. But Rome is getting under her skin.
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