Julia Child

A new HBO series about Julia Child explores the radicalism of an untamed appetite—whatever the age.

“I don’t care if it is nuts or a terrible business decision … I want it more than anything.” And, the series suggests, that might be enough. It positions Julia as the indomitable leader of what she describes as “a confederacy of women, an estrogen safety net,” while the real Child, by all accounts, was alarmed by groups of only women, which she supposedly likened to “a clacking hen house.” In a late episode, the show imagines a blistering critique of Julia’s work from a noted second-wave feminist, briefly miring her in self-doubt. Julia, created and co-written by The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Daniel Goldfarb, shares that series’ ebullience, along with its central conceit of a funny, privileged woman fighting to be more than a wife. Julia, a sparkling new series on HBO Max, skips past this early period (perhaps assuming that its target audience is well acquainted with it by now) to focus on a different urge Child found herself with in midlife: the hunger for, simply, more. Julia’s memoir, My Life in France, and the movie Julie & Julia (starring Meryl Streep in an Oscar-nominated performance as Child) have documented how voluptuously and shamelessly she embraced the pleasure that food and love gave her. “I feel I am only existing until I see you, and hug you, and eat you,” she wrote to Paul Child before they married, when she was attending cooking classes in Beverly Hills to try to mold herself into a more wifely prospect.