Emily in Paris is one of the most watched shows on Netflix. It is also one of the least accurate depictions of Paris I have encountered in ten years of living here. I walked the filming locations to show you the difference between the Paris in the show and the actual city.

Emily’s apartment is located in the 5th arrondissement, near the Place de l’Estrapade. The apartment she lives in is presented as a chambre de bonne, a maid’s room, which are the small attic apartments under the rooftops that young people in Paris typically rent cheaply. The apartment in the show is enormous by the standards of any real chambre de bonne, and the monthly rent for a space that size in that neighborhood would be around 2,500 to 3,000 euros. This is not a junior marketing salary.

Gabriel’s restaurant is presented throughout the show as a classic French bistro. The actual location is Terra Nera, an Italian trattoria on the Île Saint-Louis. The production dressed the exterior, but the building is Italian not French. There is something slightly ironic about the most “authentically French” restaurant in the show being an Italian one.

The most glaring geographic error I found was a shot of Pont Neuf that is not the Pont Neuf in Paris. The bridge in the shot is clearly the Pont Neuf in Toulouse, a different city. The production used what it needed visually without checking whether Parisian viewers would notice. They noticed.

The Gare de l’Est scene, where Emily and Gabriel board a train for a trip to the south of France, is set in the wrong station. Trains to the south of France depart from the Gare de Lyon. The Gare de l’Est serves Germany and Eastern Europe. This is not a subtle error.

What the show does get right is the beauty of the city itself. The Palais Royal, the Pont des Arts, the streets of the Marais, the light on the Seine in the evening. Paris is a genuinely photogenic city and the show captures that accurately. It just builds a fantasy around it that has very little to do with how people actually live here.