Five episodes into the new HBO Max series about the beginning of Julia Child’s ascent as a media celebrity and the patron goddess of all things food TV, we are left wondering if we really need yet another show about her.
It is hard to find anything particularly new or exciting in Julia, the HBO Max series about the beginning of Julia Child’s ascent as a media celebrity. This is entertainment TV, and it’s quite likely that viewers interested in food and cooking may find the story appealing and the character charming, in all her quirks. It feels like the writers had in mind mainstream, recently converted foodies as their target audience. The show could also appeal to those interested in understanding the transformations in how Americans deal with, think, and talk about food. Some viewers may even engage in a game of comparison between the current HBO Max production and Nora Ephron’s 2009 film Julie and Julia. Who plays the best Julia, Meryl Streep or Sarah Lancashire? Who embodies Paul Child better, Stanley Tucci or David Hyde Pierce? Which version is more realistic? Who stuck more closely to the facts? Fewer would make reference to the recent 2021 documentary by Julie Cohen and Betsy West, also carrying the title Julia. And there is more: in Dishing with Julia Child on PBS, current celebrity chefs discuss Julia’s legacy, while in The Julia Child Challenge on the Food Network is it home cooks (and Julia’s fan) that compete to prepare the best versions of her dishes and to propose personal creations inspired by her.
The HBO Max Julia avatar is definitely naughtier than Ephron’s: she gleefully drops F bombs, not only as swear words but also to actually talk about sex with her husband and friends. While cooking coq au vin for the show pilot, she exclaims: “It is the most delicious cock I ever put in my mouth, and that’s saying something.” This Julia drinks with abandon, galivants late at night, and shows at times an unpleasant edge, expecting the world (and the people who inhabit it, including her friends) to bow to her desires. She clashes with Simca (Simone Beck), who she is collaborating with on a new book, because the French woman is not ready to embrace the need for accurate directions that Julia feels American readers need. While Simca relishes being imprecise, describing Julia as lacking intuition (“it is like making love to a German”), Julia points out that precision is exactly what makes French food exceptional and professional. Facing a masculine world where food is considered a domestic, female work that does not deserve respect, Julia seems to appreciate the legacy of the Boston home economics school, with its attempt at making cooking scientific.
Overall, the HBO Max show offers a portrait of an entitled, college educated, well-off white woman from the 1960s looking for ways to express herself. Julia Child is represented first and foremost as trying to assert herself in a world in which men have the upper hand, both in domestic and in professional relationships. As a matter of fact, the writers do their best to describe her and her friends as precursors of second-wave feminism. Her groundbreaking how The French Chef debuted in Boston on public TV in 1963, so the timing is right.
She entertains a complicated relationship with the father, who never accepted her marriage with Paul (too much of a gold digger, in his opinion), but she has no qualms about asking him for the money she needs to produce her show. She has to support and reassure her husband, who is dealing with masculinity issues: besides the constant tension with Julia’s father, who does not consider a real breadwinner, his professional life is in disarray. Dismissed from his previous career in the US intelligence community, he lacks direction. He tries painting, but he is not good at it, despite Julia and her friends’ ruses to give him some visibility. As Julia gets more popular, he resists her plans to be on TV. Partly out of snobbishness, he deems TV as just a fad; he needs to conceive of Julia’s show as an educational enterprise to get on board. Only later he realizes that Julia has been following him all her life, whether she liked it or not, and it is now his turn to support him.
All along the show, we are presented a gallery of self-aggrandizing, fragile, pretentious, hardheaded men that constantly need to have their egos massaged: TV hosts, producers, technicians all feel they know better and there is not much women can contribute. Women must constantly apologize to them or diminish themselves if they are more competent or successful. It is basically like watching Mad Men, minus the smart clothes and the glamor of advertising. Or Hidden Figures, without the race issues (more about that later). Not that the theme of gender is irrelevant; unfortunately, it is still current and urgent. However, at times, the feminist spirit comes out quite clumsily in the writing; for instance, we hear Julia say: “I envision a confederacy of women, an estrogen safety net.”
As her TV adventure advances, Julia finds herself at the center of a sisterhood of women that struggle to find their place in the sun. Judith Jones, the editor of Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking at Knopf, is also John Updike’s editor, and her boss wants her to focus on the wonder boy rather than a woman and her cooking. Judith’s boss is a woman: we cannot forget that for many professional women coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s the kitchen was a place of exploitation and thankless work, a position that many second-waves feminists embraced with a vengeance. Yet, the young housewives and mothers Julia gives cooking lesson to in order to raise money for the her show, find a venue for self-expression and strength in food: one rediscovers the will to finish her dissertation, another begins overcoming her grief over the death of a parent.
At the same time, Julia struggles with aging and menopause; not being able to have children is suggested as one of the reasons she embarked in writing a cookbook and later in launching her TV career. She feels less than pretty and afraid that her husband does not find her attractive any longer. These are the moments in which we have glimpses of a vulnerable Julia: less of a juggernaut and more of a full-blown character. As much as she aims to fight patriarchy – although she would not put it quite in those terms – she uses food in traditional ways to entice men, get them on her side, and advance her plots: she uses a chocolate almond torte to convince an exec, a chicken for Paul, goose liver pâté and sherry for another exec.
While the theme of women’s role in society is at the center of the narrative from the start, it is only in the fifth episode that the show touches on other aspects of social marginalization. James Beard, another oracle of American cuisines, allows the writers to comment on queerness. Discussing his failed tv show with Julia, Beard reflects: “America can’t love a fat old fairy like me.” In San Francisco, he takes Julia to a gay bar where one of the drag queens, Coco Van, impersonates her; the budding TV star clearly feels out of place, but ends up performing on stage with her.
Alice Naman, a black woman who is an associate producer in the TV stations where Julia works on her projects, allows the show to address race directly. She has to fight not only what other professional women face in her career, but also the limitations that at the time were imposed on all African-Americans. However, the show only passingly touches on the civil rights movement, which was already opposing Jim Crows laws and would lead to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Alice’s mother seems more preoccupied with her daughter’s being single than with her career, and very pragmatically does not even takes into consideration the race factor, which is dealt as a fact of life that generations of Black Americans had to deal with. While these tensions between mother and daughter in part reflect actual conversations that were taking place within the Black community, the overall effect is to underline how Julia and her Boston world was insulated from what was shaking the fundations of American society at the time.
The series is much more effective in describing how Julia’s show was instrumental in the development of food TV, from the elaboration of effective formats to the construction of functional sets and the serendipitous devising of technical solutions to bring food to the small screen. All things considered, the show does not indulge too much in food porn, with the exceptions of a few sequences in the first episode; for the rest, the emphasis is on what happens behind the studio cameras. The HBO Max series highlights how American mass media were changing. It makes a big deal of how the idea of selling a show to stations within a network was novel and wondrous. It also explores of the birth of the multimedia food celebrity. Julia had already published a book and at first she was thinking to use TV to promote it. Instead, TV fame ended up pushing the sales of the book.
This show’s Julia loves attention: comfortable in front of the cameras, despite her height and the looks that were not particularly appealing to male TV executives, she feels as if “coming into focus… I don’t want to feel Invisible, I want to be relevant.” She is ready to share personal anecdotes, including the story of when Paul introduced her sole meuniere and the dish was so good she started crying. “It is almost as you took my virginity twice,” she quips to her husband, “first by fucking me and then my feeding me.” She is happy to answer the phone to talk to random readers, but when she starts receiving large quantities of fan mail, she realizes she is getting more than she bargained for. The encounter with the drag queen brings home the fact that people feel close to her, and they may notice stuff she herself is not fully aware of.
In the end, the series is enjoyable and has its funny moment, but we wonder if it was a good idea to keep on working on material that is already quite well known. Priya Krishna, author of Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family, mentioned Martin Yan in a recent PBS review of the show. We should ask ourselves whether it is time for other titans in the history of American cuisine to take the center stage. Edna Lewis, anyone? Or the fact that she is already on a US mail stamp disqualifies her?