The Reality Of PR vs Emily In Paris: Industry Girls Spill Their Hot Takes

There are two kinds of people who watch Emily in Paris on Netflix: those who believe it’s a harmless rom-com fantasy, and those who work in marketing, PR, Magazines or communications and feel a small eye twitch every time miss Cooper lands a full-blown campaign over cocktails, armed with an an unlimited visa and zero deadlines.

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For many women in the industry, the show is a post-work ritual, equal parts comfort watch and professional hazard. It’s starry, bingeable and quite absurd, but it also sells a version of our jobs that feels… suspiciously easy. Ideas land instantly. Budgets are limitless. Emails get replies. Visas, rent and burnout? Never heard of them.

So we asked marketing and communications gals to tell us how Emily in Paris really lands when you know what goes on behind the scenes — beyond the hashtags, CHANELs and those conveniently timed ‘eureka’ moments.

The fantasy vs the floor plan

“I watch Emily in Paris after long days at work, and every episode feels like a small collision between fantasy and reality,” says Disha Talreja from The Estée Lauder Companies EMEA, Paris. What unfolds on screen, ideas rewarded immediately, confidence never questioned, moves at a pace entirely alien to real life. “In my world, ideas take years to breathe. They move slowly through meeting rooms, calendars, endless operational tasks and quiet negotiations just to be heard.”

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The show skips the parts no one films: self-doubt, hierarchy, the grind. It also skips the economics. “The salary that barely covers rent, let alone couture,” Disha adds, not to mention French bureaucracy, which she says “can reduce even the most ambitious woman to tears over a visa appointment.” And yet, she still watches. Because beneath the absurdity, there’s something achingly familiar — the hunger and the belief that one day, you’ll earn your seat at the table too, especially as a women.

The immigrant reality check

For Aditi Mangesh, Junior Graphic Designer at ELLE India, the fantasy didn’t even make it to her Netflix queue. “As an immigrant in Paris, my mental health was at peak rock bottom,” she says. Four house moves in a year, landlord drama, and the omnipresent fear of the préfecture de police, the government body responsible for residence permits, meant survival, not style, was the priority.

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“And this Emily found a luxury Haussmann apartment on her marketing salary. Please shoot me,” she adds, bluntly. “The lack of préfecture de police in this show is criminal. It lives rent-free in every immigrant’s head.” Her verdict? “I don't like this girl, and in real life, she would’ve been fired before the first season ended.”

PR, but make it exhausting

“The idea of showing up in designer outfits every day while using public transport feels wildly unrealistic,” says Prachi Chavan, Senior Account Manager at Ruder Finn, Mumbai. Beyond aesthetics, it’s Emily’s so-called ‘big ideas’ that really stretch belief. “They’re treated like lightning strikes. In reality, many wouldn’t survive an internal review, let alone a client WhatsApp group.”

Budgets, too, are conspicuously absent. “Which is honestly the biggest joke in this economy,” Prachi adds. Real PR, she says, is pitching, chasing, fixing, coordinating, apologising profusely, and quietly making things work. “Either she has more than 24 hours in a day, or she’s doing a very different job from the rest of us.”

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Urmi Mistry, a PR professional with eight years in the industry, agrees. “They make it look so easy, and that really gets to me,” she says. From finalising an idea to executing it, the chaos, coordination and long hours are nowhere to be seen. Emily’s job, Urmi jokes, feels like that of “the accidental influencer trying to make it work,” where aesthetics and a good hashtag trump experience. “If it were us, our boss would call it immature and under-qualified.” And those daytime cocktails? “Watching her focus on her love life during an event made me want to laugh and cry at the same time,” Urmi adds. 

PR through an Instagram filter

“Emily in Paris feels like the industry filtered through an Instagram Paris filter, too smooth and perfected,” says Nishita Singhal, Head of Digital Marketing & Strategic Partnerships at Off-Script PR. Emily’s ability to crack a brand’s problem in seconds and get instant approvals is, at best, aspirational.

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“In real life, those moments come after endless decks, rejected pitches, follow-ups, client calls that could’ve been emails, and chasing journalists,” she says. What’s missing are the cancellations, budget pushbacks and the dreaded ‘let’s circle back’. And then there’s Emily herself — always polished, somehow functioning without an iced coffee dependency. “Completely unrealistic,” Nishita laughs, “but something I desperately wish was possible.” Still, she admits there’s comfort in watching a burnout-free version of the grind. “It’s PR without the madness. And sometimes, that rose-tinted version of yourself is nice.”

The parts that are real

Not everyone dismisses the show entirely. Shreya Khaladkar, Marketing and Communication Lead for India and South Asia at Believe, relates to Emily’s optimism. “New markets and challenges really do spark creativity,” she says. But the frictionless wins? Less so. “We don’t let things just happen. We drive outcomes through endless pitching, stakeholder wrangling and problem-solving.”

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Her own Paris work trip came with a reminder the show conveniently forgets: “The Eiffel Tower is not visible from everywhere.” Similarly, Anoushka Madan from Galeries Lafayette India points out that in luxury, the end result does look glamorous. “A beautifully executed campaign often appears effortless — that’s the job,” she says. But the persistence, teamwork and behind-the-scenes chaos are what actually make the magic happen. “The grind just doesn’t make great TV.”

One post doesn’t change perception overnight

Adding to the chorus of industry insiders calling out the oversimplification is our marketing executive, Twisha Dediya, at ELLE India, who points out how the show consistently reduces complex strategy into Instagram magic. “I don’t think the industry is portrayed very truthfully in Emily in Paris. It’s too glitzy and gimmicky — and while that makes for a great watch, it oversimplifies what marketing, PR and communications actually look like in reality,” she says. Yes, the industry can appear superficial at first glance, especially when fashion, aesthetics and social media are involved — but that’s only the surface.

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“The show makes it seem like one social media post can magically solve a brand brief or shift perception overnight — if only it were that easy,” she adds. 

The bigger problem with glossy denial

For Eshaan Raj, Communications Trainee at Studio Shibui, the concern goes beyond realism. “Shows like this send out a half-baked vision to people entering the workforce,” he says. When reality hits, the gap can be jarring. While he acknowledges the aspirational pull, he argues that flattening a layered discipline into instant wins does a disservice to the industry.

Ainee Nizami Ahmedi, Editorial Director at ELLE India, takes it a step further. “We all have the internet. We know how the world works. So why are we still being served shows this detached from reality? Visa issues, cost of living, cultural friction,none of these ever trouble Emily in the show. I love fiction, but it’s 2025, and this kind of gliterry denial isn’t escapism anymore; it’s laziness. Sure, this fantasy once worked for Sex and the City,  Carrie living on a freelancer’s salary, HELLO, but that was a very different cultural moment. At some point, bending reality entirely to suit a narrative stops being fun and starts insulting the audience. It’s time to say no to stories that flatten complexity instead of writing intelligent plots that actually engage people.”

So why does Emily still deserve her moment?

Because even with all its chaos, caricature and couture-fuelled unreality, Emily in Paris has earned the cultural space it occupies. In a media landscape where toxic masculinity is still loud, celebrated and endlessly centred, it’s not a crime for a woman like Emily to exist — ambitious, visible, flawed, hopeful and unapologetically feminine.

Yes, the show simplifies our work. Yes, it skips the burnout, the bureaucracy, the budgets and the breakdowns. But it also places a young woman at the centre of her career journey, allows her to take up space without punishment, and lets her want more — more success, more love, more colour, more life — without turning her into a cautionary tale.

Emily may not represent the reality of marketing, PR or communications, but she represents something else just as important: permission. Permission to dream loudly, to be messy and optimistic at the same time, and to imagine a world where women’s ambition isn’t constantly questioned or softened for comfort. So we’ll keep rolling our eyes, correcting the fantasy and laughing through the inaccuracies — but we’ll keep watching too. Because in a world that still struggles to let women like Emily win, sometimes letting her exist is the win.