The conventions of the Hollywood biopic are so entrenched that Adam McKay has carved out a lucrative niche primarily in acknowledging the artifice (not fixing or updating it, mind you). Naturally, HBO’s Winning Time has received some criticism for a possible excess of the fourth-wall-breaking, dramatic irony and genre-tweaking that are McKay’s hallmarks.
Audiences troubled by the meta touches (and perhaps the sour tone) in Winning Time may feel more at home with HBO Max‘s Julia, a resolutely old-fashioned, middle-brow bio-dramedy about Julia Child, public television and the healing power of a good marriage. Julia mostly doesn’t wink or nudge (and the moments it does are easily the show’s worst), and it indulges in clichés without self-consciousness or self-awareness. It’s an earnestness that won’t be for everybody, but being conventional doesn’t preclude occasional fun bits of media-savvy insight, an abundance of well-photographed food and a towering — in every sense — central performance from Sarah Lancashire.
Related Stories
Julia
Created by Daniel Goldfarb (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), with Charles McDougall directing the first two episodes, Julia begins in 1961 with Julia (Lancashire) and husband Paul (David Hyde Pierce) enjoying a celebratory dinner after hearing that her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, will be published. The landmark book’s publication comes as Julia is beginning menopause and the series — in a way that feels a bit cringe-worthy and reductive given its male-dominated creative origins — treats her new ventures as the child she never got to have. Promoting the book on Boston’s public television station, Julia upstages the talk show host by preparing an omelet on-air.
To the surprise of the program’s initially snooty director Russ (Fran Kranz, very funny and not as beholden to stereotypes as you initially fear) and the other desiccated white men who prefer to mock both cooking and the not-traditionally-photogenic Julia, the segment is a hit. This opens the door for Julia to propose a standalone pilot, against resistance from the station brass and even from Paul, who views television as a low-culture fad. With the help of WGBH associate producer Alice (Brittany Bradford), Julia’s best friend Avis (Bebe Neuwirth) and the reluctant Paul, Julia shoots an amusingly amateurish episode preparing coq au vin and a legend is born.
There are stops and starts to Julia’s progress, but — spoiler alert for the historically oblivious — most viewers know that she is going to become arguably the most important figure in 20th-century food culture. This means that while Julia has at least one steak — with frites! — it’s a series with almost no stakes, and it’s astonishing how many of the obstacles Julia faces can be overcome by writing a check. As presented in Julia, she dealt with some insidious and gross sexism and condescension, but nothing of the sort that yields drama in a series that, at eight episodes, is already spread thin.
Even the dramatic liberties taken by Goldfarb and showrunner Chris Keyser can’t produce stakes — whether it’s a painfully contrived encounter with a very famous person (and recent prestige television punching bag) in a late-season episode or the decision to swap out Ruth Lockwood, Child’s real-life producer, with Alice, a Black woman whose experiences with racism (in Boston in the early 1960s no less) are so entirely negligible that it feels like the producers are making an unsupportable point.
Just because there’s no risk of anything going seriously wrong in Julia — even the season’s one death is off-screen and a bit negligible — doesn’t mean that there aren’t interesting things here, but you have to be a certain kind of viewer, or maybe a dedicated fan of sweetbreads, to be fully engaged by them. It’s little innovations, like how Russ and the crew developed the visual grammar of cooking TV, or the role Alice played (somewhat fictionally) in helping get a small local public television show syndicated on stations nationwide. In perhaps my favorite subplot of the season — Julia is so central to everything here that the show mostly loses energy when it goes to B or C stories — Paul and Julia’s book editor Judith Jones (Fiona Glascott) figures out, through trial and error, how to make properly crusty baguettes, and it’s captivating and very funny.
Judith, incidentally, deserves an entire series to herself. Famous for picking The Diary of Anne Frank off of the reject pile and a collaborator with Updike, Camus and Sartre, Judith has conflicts with mentor Blanche Knopf (Judith Light) — who is dedicated to protecting the line between high literature and cook books — that are interesting on their own, and Glascott is completely charming.
This series, of course, belongs to Lancashire. Audiences who don’t know Happy Valley or Last Tango in Halifax may not know this British titan at all, and even if you come in with the proper degree of respect, Lancashire quickly vanishes entirely. As a character, Julia Child has the advantage of being one of those historical personages who cannot be played too big (just ask Meryl Streep); the key is to accept that her sing-song cadences and distinctive posture are inherently cartoonish, then find the real person from there. Lancashire embraces all of what’s familiar about Child, and shows the discomfort and over-compensation that come from living your whole life standing out in that way.
The marriage between Julia and Paul lasted nearly 50 years and it’s the heart of the series, a bond that’s supportive, nurturing and, yes, sexual. It’s an asset that Pierce gets to play some of the same persnickety traits that made Frasier‘s Niles Crane iconic, but in a more sympathetic and vulnerable form. And letting Neuwirth and Pierce share scenes in a Boston-set series feels like a delightful in-joke.
Bradford stands out in an ensemble that also features fine work from James Cromwell as Julia’s stern father, Isabella Rossellini as Julia’s flighty cookbook collaborator Simone Beck and a wonderfully sniveling Jefferson Mays as the host who gives Julia her first TV break.
Though its sense of time and television producing schedules is odd, Julia keeps its first season contained exclusively to the first season of The French Chef. That means that there could be many episodes and recipes potentially to come, though I’d prefer that Judith Jones series, with Sarah Lancashire cameos. And let’s just not do Emeril next.
