The beauty of Julia Child was that viewers felt that they knew her.
She could have been your neighbor, your mom’s best friend, the sweet old woman muttering to herself at the grocery store. Every week, she let you into her kitchen and cooked for you.
In “Julia,” the camera zooms out to the rest of The French Chef’s world.
The HBO Max series, which premiered Thursday, picks up before the cookbook writer, played by Sarah Lancashire, launches her industry-altering show; instead, she and husband Paul (David Hyde Pierce) are simply content celebrating her book being published. But when Julia accidentally upstages a stodgy Boston talk show host by preparing an omelet on air with her, she suddenly finds herself in high demand.
Everyone knows how the story ends: Julia Child, overwhelming in height and charm, became one of the most familiar faces of the 1960s, teaching audiences how to make coq a vin and boeuf bourguignon. But “Julia” takes it slow.
“There’s a tradition in biopics that the end is the thing that matters. Everything is moving toward the end. Are you going to become a star or not?” showrunner Chris Keyser told the Daily News.
“That’s not what life is about. Love stories are always about ‘are you together’ but not ‘how do you stay together?’.”
As Julia’s show develops, her world grows. It pulls in her best friend, Avis (Bebe Neuwirth), two WGBH producers — one stuck with her, Russ Morash (Fran Kranz), and another who sees potential, Alice (Brittany Bradford) — and her book publisher, Judith Jones (Fiona Glascott), who was better known for editing “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Albert Camus and John Updike.
“There’s something extraordinary in every person and I think there’s something special in this season and in Julia specifically that pulls that out of everyone,” Bradford, whose Alice has to battle both sexism and racism at the station, told The News. “Everyone’s an ordinary person but there’s something magical about each one.”
“Julia” is careful to acknowledge her privilege, the daughter of a rich-enough family that she could simply handwave budgetary issues away with a check, paying for her own groceries and drafting bored friends to serve as kitchen staff.
At the same time, the cooking show host can’t solve everything with money. Her marriage has its ups and downs. No one at WGBH, except for Alice, truly believes in her. And she’s squarely facing the ‘60s, when the housewives are going head-to-head with the feminists. A career woman telling women to get back in the kitchen? Julia simply couldn’t win.
“There are moments of despair and moments of exhaustion,” Glascott said. “We’re watching them create so many things we take for granted.”
Kranz, whose TV producer Russ finds himself won over by Julia’s charm even when the bottom line doesn’t match, called both “Julia” and Julia a balancing act between a woman changing the world and a woman trying to find her place in the world. She never dreamed, or maybe even intended, to have the impact she did.
So instead, by focusing on her family, her friends and her community even as James Beard wines and dines her, “Julia” stays small.
“It was really about the intimacy and the humanity and the day-to-dayness of it all,” Bradford said.
Child convinced a generation of women that they could cook, because if she could, you could. Never mind that she had decades of training and practice. She believed in you.
“She didn’t look like what we think of as a celebrity,” creator Daniel Goldfarb told The News. “She didn’t sound like what we think of as a celebrity. But she spent 15 years writing the definitive book on French cooking… and then she essentially invented the cooking show as we know it. She didn’t do it for fame and she didn’t do it for money. She did it because she was really passionate about food.
“She was a teacher at heart and she wanted to spread this message with complete guilelessness. To me, that was really extraordinary.”
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