I was roasting in the current conflagration, my skin rippling in the heat of absolute political madness when I decided I couldn’t take it anymore, turned off YouTube news, and turned on a show I’d been assured was an unfilled Krispy Kreme glurge of bad writing and worse acting. I had been warned off, I had been eye rolled away from, I had been advised to avoid, at all cost to the rigor of my intellect–Wile E. Coyote hanging from a thin dry cliffside twig as it is—Emily in Paris.

Jesus, Bull, are you ok?

I’m fine. Look, I know some of you, upon reaching the end of that sentence above, rolled your eyes so hard you cracked your skull and I want you to know I understand. I also have standards. I know Bela Tar. I watched the Werckmeister Harmonies. I think the Turin Horse is a cinematic masterpiece that will withstand the passing of ages. I adore Sátántangó. I get why it matters. Film like this. Television like this. Cinema that transforms the viewer and reworks their expectation of its power are vital for the revitalization of our artistic souls. We need auteurs. We need Werner Herzog. We need Fitcaraldo in all its maniacal, gun wielding, indigenous people abusing madness.

But we also need Emily in Paris

Just not for the same reasons. We need Emily in Paris because we occasionally need to disconnect from the relentless exercise of our discerning mind, to detach our attention from the endless saccade between clips of brutality, devastation, witless whining presented as rhetoric, and the dumpster juice soaked shit crusted drunken porn muppet douche knuckle haunting our newsfeed and threatening to throw our world out of orbit.

For a relentless doom scroller like me, Emily in Paris is a balm. It took me a minute to realize I was hooked from the first scene. I eye-rolled my way through three episodes, even clicking out of the show to realign my aesthetic with poignant clips from Democracy Now, and fail videos. But I clicked back in. I clicked back in when I realized that while I was immersed in the show’s sugar-coated low-stakes nonsense, I was perfectly happy.

It’s morphine tv.

I had my gall bladder out last month and it was a grueling, five-hour surgery that taxed the metal of my doctor. He came into the waiting room to report why it had taken five times longer than expected and was visibly shaken. It was the hardest gall bladder extraction of his career as my inflamed organ was gangrenous and had grabbed hold of every other organ within reach. That’s why I was in the kind of doubled-over voice-barely-a-whisper mind-altering agony for three days leading up to the surgery and I’m TMI-ing you now to tell you they shot me full of dilaudid and morphine and fentanyl for the five days I was in hospital and it was wonderful. I lay in bed perfectly still with no book, no TV, no phone, no scrolling. Just me staring at the ceiling living my best life.

I needed that respite. I needed to remain still and heal. I needed to detach from the pain of recovery. Thank God for opiates and thank God for Emily in Paris for exactly the same reason with exactly the same effect.

I watch this show from the depths of my La-z-Boy

Imagine me sunken into the faux leather interior of that chair, staring mindlessly at Phil Collins’ youngest daughter as she flits through the city of lights doing a cinematic quick change from alarmingly imaginative dress to alarmingly imaginative dress. There is never a moment when the screen isn’t drenched in perfectly balanced color palettes. Never a second when the composition isn’t exact. Never a full minute when the dialogue or the story threatens to dredge up any emotion other than contentment or mild joy. Emily in Paris asks for nothing. It requires all the intellectual commitment of a sneeze. The difference between me lying perfectly flat in a hospital bed zonked out on morphine and me crashed out in my TV chair zonked out on Lilly Collins is indiscernible.

But why? Why does it work? How does it do that?

Every aspect of this show should send me into a fit of boomer harrumphs. It is more shallow than Friends, offers lower stakes than The Big Bang Theory, and often has the same color palette as the Muppet Show. Instead of binge-watching this garbage, I should smash the screen with a hardcover copy of Being and Time. I should burn my TV stand and pack up my belongings and move to a one bedroom carriage house outside Bogota to spend my days reading Proust and writing my memoirs. But I don’t. I don’t even care. I’m not even embarrassed.

It’s MTV. That’s what it is.

They know their audience, and if you think their audience is the teenage grandchildren of the cast of Jersey Shore (you know I’m right), you are wrong. It’s everyone, especially boomers like you and me. Boomers eat it up with a coke spoon. But so do Millennials. The show loosely and lightly plays on that generational gap with the conflict between Emily, the disaffected American influencer and her boss, a worldly cigarette smoking noon-drinking French business woman, Sylvie, played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu a sexy French actress you may have seen in everything from The Crown to Call my Agent (if you, like me, are into French television).

Sylvie is not only a certified boomer (1963, bitch, and she looks damn good for 61) but French, so Emily’s selfie addiction and meteoric rise to influencer status while working in her boutique marketing firm drives her out of her fucking tree. Which works for me because about 90 percent of the shit that comes out of the mouths of my Gellenial friends and family works my last nerve. Like Sylvie, I want to throw Emily off the roof of a pied d’ terre, but…but no I don’t.

Because she isn’t Emily. She’s Audrey Hepburn.

The romcoms of the late 50s and early 60s served a purpose. We were living through some stark shit—McCarthyism, the Cold War, and rising nuclear threat. Culture was in a turmoil of change, with the elders clutching their pearls over the utter lack of regard from anyone under thirty. Their music was weird, their language was even weirder, and they did nothing but smoke pot and fuck. Sound familiar?

But movies like Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s held the elders’ attention. They sat in the dark in those warm movie theaters watching Audrey Hepburn flit her way across Rome with Cary Grant without a fucking care in the world. She was magnificently attired, perfectly coifed, unmolested by reality, and beautiful. But she was also smart. Sure, she darted across the Italian capital as if she floated on air, but she also said things that were startling in their naive pragmatism. Hepburn was the original manic-pixie-dream-girl, the prototype for subsequent quirky starlets from Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall in Annie Hall to Zoe Deschanel’s Jess in New Girl. And Emily Cooper in Emily in Paris.

Surrounded by Loveable Nerds and Heart Throb Hunks

The cast is a collection of stock characters:

• • The sassy gay friend, Julien, played by Samuel Arnold

• • The forgivable, quirky pervert, Luc, played by Bruno Gouery

• • The hot friend, Mindy Chin, played by Ashley Park

• • The sexy rival, Camille, played by Camille Razat

• • The unbearably handsome on again off again boyfriend, Gabriel, played by Lucas Bravo

• • The fairly handsome stop-gap fuckbuddy, Alfie, played by Lucien Laviscount

Of course, there are plenty more, but you get the idea. We’re not breaking any ice caps here. We’re not exploring new territory. These tropes have been planted and plowed until the ground is fallow. Except for MTV, after, I assume, sacrificing a hectare of goats, who have imbued this empty vessel with life—or something like life.

Which is all I can handle sometimes. I’m getting plenty of real-life from the fucking news and I don’t like it. Jesus Gaza Christ can we have an off year, please? Can we live through a low-key annum of news poor Mondays for once? We deserve a break. Just…just call off the killing and the racism and the endlessly implicit threat of rampantly unbalanced predatory capitalism for, like, six months. Please. We’re tired. We’re emotionally bereft. I don’t want to point my eyes at the footage from [all of it] anymore because I’m having a hard time rising to the surface to care. I’m becoming desensitized to horror. Just a brief respite, then I’ll be back and screaming at the news and hurling insults in the right direction, I swear, and devouring my hearty servings of existential dread. But for a moment, I need a palette cleanser.

I need—we need—Emily in Paris.