I could watch Sarah Lancashire and Isabella Rossellini argue about the propriety of fish-shaped pastry for much longer than an hour, but apparently Julia has other characters and would like us to spend some time with them. Lancashire’s performance as the chef and author Julia Child is one of this arch, twinkly show’s main draws, but by the time we rejoin her in season two, her TV show The French Chef has triumphed over the odds, making her a star, so now the drama must find other sources of tension. Franco-American disagreements about what constitutes a cassoulet seem as good a place to start as any.
Julia is a rich and highly stylised show, which lingers as lovingly on its dialogue as it does on food. It begins its second outing with a lengthy period of separation for the bulk of the cast, dividing its time between France, where Julia and Paul (David Hyde Pierce, a perfect match for Lancashire) have escaped the madness of fame, and Boston, where the 1960s explosion in popular culture is picked over and mined for drama, from the sexism of the TV world to the power dynamics of book publishing, via several diversions to the anti-Vietnam war movement.
