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Television veterinarian John Wells (“ER”, “Southland”) works with a production team that includes designer Molly Smith Metzler and Margot Robbie to adapt the bestseller by Stephanie Land Housekeeper: hard work, low wages and a mother’s will to survive. Working from a brief gives “Maid” a sense of lived credibility that many projects like this fail to achieve. Land has lived through much of that story, and it’s a production that clearly sought to recreate that truth.
Her surrogate mother in the TV version is Alex (Qualley), a young woman with a toddler who decides to leave her abusive husband Sean (Nick Robinson) in the middle of the night. With only $ 18 to her name, she is really trying to make it through the next day, to collect enough money for shelter, food and security for herself and her daughter. Her journey leads her to a housekeeping service run by Yolanda (Tracy Vilar) and the life of her bipolar mother Paula (Andie MacDowell, who is Qualley’s real mother, which adds another layer of realism) and her ex- Father Hank (a Billy Burke). She also crosses paths with a high maintenance owner named Regina (an incredible Anika Noni Rose), who ends up being way more than she first appears.
Any “Maid” ends up being more than it first appears. My fear that it might be outright miserability, watching someone flirt with the edge of homelessness for ten hours, was quickly allayed by the wealthy characters and the show’s willingness to provide flashes of humor. and joy. The supporting cast here is a lot richer than a typical soap opera, as people like Sean, Regina, and Hank are given complex stories. But the show is owned by Qualley, who anchors nearly every scene as a woman whose fight for survival is never tapped or won on the cheap. You quickly come to care about Alex, so that every little act of kindness she finds or every attempt at stability is genuine, and every setback hits you right in the chest.
“Maid” improves as Qualley and the rest of the cast are allowed to reveal layers of this character drama. At first, this may seem like the show he mostly avoids becoming, sometimes leaning toward dialogue and narrative clichés about poverty in those early couple episodes. The fact that Metzler, Qualley, and the company subvert the tropes they come close to during these early episodes is what makes this show so strong overall. It really won me over around episode five as Alex ends up cleaning out a notorious burglar’s house and ends up drawing parallels between his past and his, as well as what it says about his struggles. here. I also loved how the series often uses an episodic structure, telling an ongoing story but also offering standalone hours in their own way, like Chapter Five. (More shows have to move away from the ‘split film’ form and embrace episodic TV – it works.)
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