She’s not as dazzlingly funny as Streep; that has to do with Streep’s talent, when she chooses to exercise it, for warm, effortless humor. But it also has to do with the nature of “Julia” trying to be a lot but not making much effort to be the charming romantic comedy that Streep’s parts of “Julie & Julia” were. (The Julie sections, about a blogger working his way through Child’s recipes, are best forgotten.)
Daniel Goldfarb, who created “Julia”, is a producer of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, and one of the main themes of the new series – which is also its most entertaining aspect – is “Maisel”-esque: a loving , a faithful reproduction of the early days of public television, combined with an accurate reproduction of Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 1960s.
We see Child and a small group of family, friends, and colleagues convince Boston station WGBH to produce her historic show “The French Chef,” and it’s such a small operation that everyone has to get involved: Child’s adoring husband, Paul (David Hyde Pierce), swings cue cards while her devoted friend Avis DeVoto (Bebe Neuwirth) squats behind the fake kitchen counter, surreptitiously handing Child knives and whisks.
These scenes of production, endless discussions, and negotiation can be a lot of fun, especially when Robert Joy is the station’s general manager, a merry mix of preoccupied dreamer and cunningly manipulative boss. Jefferson Mays also has some good moments as the arch-pretentious host of a book chat series who feels – rightly – threatened by the unexpected success of Child’s cooking show.
Snobbishness is a main theme of ‘Julia’ as Child leads a gantlet of TV producers sniffing at the idea of spending time and money filming a woman in a kitchen. (There’s also a book editor, played by Judith Light, who abhors the idea of spending time on TV.) It serves as a sort of binder for the many prejudices of the time. The producers are almost all men, so their pretension is intertwined with their sexism; meanwhile, the only junior producer who sees Child’s potential is a black woman who must fight the genteel racism of her colleagues to get the show off the ground.
