[PREVIEW] 'Love Trip: Paris' And 'Meet Me In Paris' Repackage The Fantasy Of French Romance

Ahhh, Paris. The City of Lights, the City of Love, the City of American Women Starved For Romance. In the American cultural imagination, the French capital has long been idealized as the most romantic, chic, charming destination in the world — the perfect place, as “The Bachelor” might put it, to fall in love. On the heels of “Emily in Paris,” which (fittingly) made the concept of mingling a Parisian setting with American love stories all the more marketable, two reality dating programs recently dropped on streaming channels. On Roku, Reese Witherspoon and Zoë Saldana brought us “Meet Me in Paris,” a soi-disant “reality rom-com” about three unlucky-in-love women who spend 10 whirlwind days in the city, living out a semi-scripted pursuit for love. Hulu’s “Love Trip: Paris” is a more traditional reality show featuring four Francophiles who move into a Parisian apartment building to seek love with French suitors.The two concepts are fairly different, and the results are predictably different as well: “Meet Me in Paris” is high-concept but low-impact, taking a big swing with its unusual conceit while glossing over bland casting and underbaked love connections with punchy movie-style montages and staged vignettes. “Love Trip: Paris” gives us standard reality dating fare, heavily seasoned with tropes about the hot-blooded, jealous French lovers and their culture clash with the easy-come-easy-go Americans, but the cast is undeniably more charismatic and the relationships less contrived.But there’s one thing both share, at least so far (“Love Trip: Paris” had only aired four episodes as of our taping), and that’s a conviction that Paris was made for American women to fall in love in the most picturesque way possible. Everything that Carrie Bradshaw’s disastrous Paris move at the end of “Sex and the City” deconstructed about the City of Love has been reconstructed by Emily Cooper and wholeheartedly embraced by these reality shows; it’s not a city like any other, full of inconveniences and disappointments and people with their own problems and plenty of heartache. It’s a Technicolor backdrop, a romance theme park where American women can finally live their best lives and find a hot suitor ready to risk it all for their love on every street corner. In this episode, we discuss the shared Parisian fantasy of these two streaming reality romance projects, weigh their relative strengths and weaknesses, and give a certain French suitor (ahem Mirko) a piece of our goddamned minds. Hope you enjoy! xoGive a gift subscription