Emily in Baku

  

I’m not a screamer. Nor am I a schemer. I don’t take coffee with creamer. I stopped skiing to protect my femur. If I got another pet, it wouldn’t be a lemur. I don’t have to visit Rio to admire Christ the Redeemer. And despite my generational attitudes, I’m no streamer. But there is this new show I’m watching with tepid approval. I haven’t done all that closely, so it’s quite possible I’m missing major plot points. I find clear narratives are usually just out of reach. I think I get the gist though. You may have heard of it? 

It’s called Emily in Baku. The show takes place in the Azerbaijani hotspot towards the end of 1907. Of all the obscure European port cities, Baku stands alone. Good for Netflix for embracing a wild, wild place. Back then, the metropolis was a magnet for eccentrics, lunatics, and ambitious young people studying marketing communications. Think of it like Deadwood on the Caspian Sea. Cowboys, criminals, and graduates of SUNY Purchase. There was minimal law, hardly any order, but lots and lots of fun. From what I understand, shooting a series is a bit cheaper there than in the more famous regions of western Europe. Like say, Paris.

Emily grew up in Savannah, Georgia, fixated on geometric city planning. A overabundance of town squares will do that to a child. Her love interest was a fellow Georgian – Joey Stalin. During the pilot, he arrives in town on a robber’s high, after fleecing banks throughout the Russian Empire. This was when banks still kept rubles in huge sacks. When money was something you could still run your fingers through. Joey needed a place to lay low for a bit, until things up north blew over. The Tsar ignored Baku at his peril. Over the course of the first season, Emily and Joey are love interests, though the historical record is mum on the subject. 

But it makes sense if you know either person, as I did – even in passing. What was more important to the growth of the Soviet Union than marketing? Perhaps famine. Think of all those iconic posters and wild slogans we still remember years after the Berlin Wall collapsed. They put sickles, an overlooked tool of the people, on the map. Preening proles all over Brooklyn and Berkeley plastered famous symbols of the USSR without knowing a bit of Cyrillic. It was hardly necessary. It looked cool. The font, the colors, the bald dome of Lenin ushering in a new day. Stalin came to understand kerning and ledding, but Emily, through her studies, already had a firm grasp on the keys to messaging. 

It’s revolutionary programming. Only the truly bourgeois would skip the opportunity to Nyetflix and chill.