Emily In Paris Season 4 Has A Timeline Plot Hole

There are a lot of questions you might ask yourself when watching Emily in Paris. How does she afford all her couture clothes? Why does she still barely know any French? Who are the thousands of followers liking her basic, corny Instagram posts? For most of the show, the question that plagued me particularly was how long Emily has actually been in Paris. It turns out, she might be a time traveler as well as a social media manager, because Season 4 introduced a plot hole that messes up the show’s timeline.

The fourth season kicks off with Emily and friends attending Roland-Garros, otherwise known as the French Open. It’s a perfectly posh event that allows Emily to show off some Challengers-core fashions, but one piece of the puzzle doesn’t fit. The French Open is a two-week event that always takes place from late May to early June. The only year it deviated from that schedule is in 2020, when the tourney was pushed back to September due to the coronavirus pandemic — but Emily in Paris has made it a point that COVID doesn’t exist within the world of the show, so we can ignore that anomaly.

The reason these late May or early June scenes don’t work is because Season 3 took place at the end of June. An early episode in the previous season revolved around the Fête de la Musique, a French holiday that always takes place on June 21. In the Season 4 premiere, Emily mentions that three days have passed since Gabriel and Camille’s almost-wedding, meaning the Season 3 finale had to take place on June 24 at the very earliest, although it seems much more likely weeks would have passed since the Fête de la Musique.

All this to say, the French Open would’ve already happened about a month before it does in Emily in Paris, since clearly a full year hasn’t passed between seasons. Admittedly, this is a pretty nit-picky point to make, but it’s still pretty annoying once you realize the error. We’ll just have to accept that time works differently in the world of Emily in Paris.