Cultural fandom is the ultimate members' club, and J.D. Vance wants in

J. D. Vance likening Emily in Paris to the work of Shakespeare was not on my 2026 bingo card, although perhaps it should have been. In case you didn’t know, the Vice-President recently decided the best use of his time was to defend a show once called a ‘work scheme’ for ‘people who can’t act’ (its final season airs in December) and laud it as a satire of millennial decision-making and tacit defence of the nuclear family. ‘It’s obvious,’ Vance said, ‘that Emily should end up with the French chef’ rather than wasting her time ‘with random people or [focusing] on her job.’ Such antics are emblematic of our era of PLU politics, where leaders seek to show that they are people like us as well as people, like us.

If the latter is a time-honoured tradition, the former is a novelty of our media-literate age. To be like us (no comma) in 2026 is to be clued into the zeitgeist, akin to members of a club keeping up with a culture that moves faster than Richard Hammond on an A road in Herefordshire. An almost academic obsession with a show about fashion and seductive Europeans is not the same as, say, enjoying the football.

The aim is not for Vance to pose as an electable everyman but as an esteemed member of the Emily in Paris fan club: the vox populi has become that of Netflix Et Chill. Cultural fandom is now the ultimate members’ club and belonging to one is highly prized. Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, recently found time to appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live (‘I love you Jimmy,’ he gushed effusively). Kemi Badenoch, for her part, managed to nab front-row seats to Marks & Spencer’s show during London Fashion Week (supermarket clothing wasn’t enough to entice the noticeably absent Anna Wintour) and party with young Conservatives at the Tory party conference last week in Birmingham.

Even a retired stooge such as Barack Obama compiles a public music playlist each summer, weighing in on the discourse. The question is: why? Uniting around, say, an album, song or television show perhaps is a safer bet in an age where political fractures make it hard to unite around Big Issues. There is another, more left-field theory: people at the top seek to belong because they feel lonely.

Notice how it’s always those in the C-suite who most lament our ‘lack of community’, no doubt the trendiest buzzword of 2026, even as anyone who has recently attended a gig can attest that community is alive and well, neither hard to find nor prohibitive to enjoy. Pity James David Vance, who simply must want an invitation to the season-six premiere of his absolute favourite series. It is, after all, Emily’s grand finale, an outcome he personally hopes to avoid when the midterms roll around next month. Bonne chance!

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.