Curious tale of Julia Child, the original masterchef

A new series delves into Julia Child’s evolving relationship with her husband and how she came to have her own TV cooking show.

Bebe Neuwirth and Sarah Lancashire in a scene from Julia HBO on Foxtel

Somewhat out of the blue comes Julia, the eight-part drama based on the life of famous celebrity American chef Julia Child and her successful, long-running cooking show, The French Chef, which debuted in 1963. And it is one of this year’s delights so far, beguiling, intelligent, witty, beautifully acted and warmly amusing.

Child, who had a gift for quotes, once said, “Just speak very loudly and quickly, and state your position with utter conviction, as the French do, and you’ll have a marvellous time”, and this fine, polished production has been created with the utmost conviction and in its droll way doesn’t take a false step. (My favourite Child quotes are, “A party without cake is really just a meeting” and “The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.”)

The show was created and written by Daniel Goldfarb, best known for his work as writer and producer on The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, with Chris Keyser, who worked on shows like Party of Five and The Society, as executive producer and showrunner. Director is the veteran award-winning Charles McDougall, whose work includes a wide range of hugely popular television series such as House of Cards, Sex and the City and The Office. He won an Emmy for Best Directing for a Comedy Series for his work on Desperate Housewives.

And there’s a stellar cast that includes the great British actress Sarah Lancashire (Happy Valley), Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce as Julia’s loving husband Paul, and Bebe Neuwirth, also from Frasier, as Child’s best friend and confidante Avis De Voto. She’s rarely without a cigarette or a martini in hand and, like Julia, capable of some wonderfully caustic one-liners and some telling profanity. (She’s so close to the Childs she calls herself “the third wheel that crashes your dinners.”)

Isabella Rossellini also has what is so far a delightful cameo as Simone Beck, also known as Simca, herself the author of captivating and definitive books about French cooking. She and Child became great friends after meeting at a party in the Bois de Boulogne, forging a bond like sisters, eventually becoming co-authors with Louisette Bertholle of the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. (In a show full of great one-liners, Rossellini has the best: “It is very difficult writing a cookbook with someone who is not an intuitive cook – like making love to a German.”)

It’s a series that while centred on the central relationship between Child and her husband, and the way marriage at a certain age either evolves or dissipates, also touches on many other intriguing ideas. Keyser says the series has eight hours to talk about a year in her life, taking the well-known Julia, the culinary legend, and filling in the blanks that we obviously don’t know anything about, and on the way take in a bunch of other interesting stuff.

“That means talk about food culture and the meaning of cooking, obviously. But also about celebrity, about the rise of public television, about feminism and the other social movements of the ’60s and into the ’70s, and about the evolution of a marriage from something that looks like an old-fashioned 1950s marriage – a good one – into a modern marriage.”

Child is often mentioned as the first TV cook but that honour belongs to Philip Harben who had the original television cooking program which appeared on British TV, starting in 1946 on the BBC, broadcast in black and white. He often used his own personal rations (Britain was on war provisions until about 1954) as ingredients.

His no-nonsense approach assumed his audience had never boiled an egg much less whisked up a cinnamon and Calvados souffle.

Then in the early ’50s, Phyllis “Fanny” Cradock and her third husband, monocled and drink sodden Major John Cradock, quickly established themselves as Britain’s leading experts on all things culinary. And in the US, both Dione Lucas, the nation’s leading expert in French cooking before Child took over the reins, and the formidable James Beard both had shows on TV before Child, but she was the first who was able to almost effortlessly fuse culinary education with entertainment.

Of course, Goldfarb and Keyser are not making a documentary and use Julia’s story as a kind of prism to reflect the ideas that interest them from that period, when TV itself was undergoing a series of crises because of the notorious quiz show scandal and a loss of faith was experienced by civic leaders, educators and many influential intellectuals. (Many of the most popular quiz shows were revealed to have been fixed.)

“Dan and I often talk about this as the Amadeus version of the show, which is the way Peter Shaffer talked about his play and movie,” says Keyser. “Of course, we didn’t know what possibly happened inside those rooms. But we stand by reading between the lines and intuiting what that life must have been, and that was the management journey we took.”

The first episode, set in 1961, is called “Omelette” – each stanza of the series named after one of Child’s dishes – Julia receiving news in Oslo that she’s about to be published by Knopf, which she and her diplomat husband Paul have no idea how to pronounce.

But Paul, a clever amateur painter, takes a call suggesting his days in diplomacy have come to an end. “An empty canvas awaits on the slow train towards death that is forced retirement,” he says, as a year later they settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Julia cooking – food sequences are gorgeously photographed by cinematographer Dan Stoloff – and Paul smoking and painting. Julia, though, is coping with the onset of menopause and the fading options for children with Paul.

Not sad for long, she agrees to appear on Boston’s pre-eminent public TV station, WGBH, to promote her book, much to the chagrin of her genially snobby husband. TV is only fit to keep widow’s company, he says.

In an inspired move, she decides to cook a classic French omelette on the show, which is called I’ve Been Reading, and is hosted by the academic pipe-smoking Albert “Class is now in session” Duhamel, a professor at Boston College, played with nice restrained comic touches by Jefferson Mays. A ridiculously pompous man, he delights in admitting he has never read a cookbook, more at home with Camus, Steinbeck or Ayn Rand. Maybe, he suggests, the program should be retitled “What My Wife’s Been Reading”.

Her appearance is very funny, Julia borrowing a hotplate from the station manager Russ Morash (Fran Kranz), who firmly believes cooking has no place on public TV. As her friend Avis says of the show, “If it wasn’t so goddam illuminating it would have been theatre of the absurd”.

Then, determined to be relevant, she proposes the idea of a TV cooking show to WGBH, a notion met with disdain by her husband, who sees it as a possible distraction from the work she’s doing changing the way Americans eat through her books. The blokes at the channel are hardly keen either, wanting someone shorter, more relatable, more camera-friendly and with a less distinctive sound. “One of the advantages of looking like me,” she tells them, “is that you learn not to take no for an answer.”

It’s all done with a lovely elegance and finesse, McDougall’s direction witty and understated with a lovely sense of period texture, taking us into those moments of uncertainly behind the public Julia. The performances are exemplary, Lancashire’s performance beautifully grounded and balanced and never teetering on the edge of parody.

She gets Child’s unique sing-song voice right, too, without pushing it, and her physical awkwardness. And Hyde Pierce’s Paul is beautifully unassuming and inevitably reminds one of his Niles in Frasier. (His drolleries here brought back a favourite line from that show, Niles ordering a coffee at Cafe Nervosa, where he and Frasier hang out: “I’ll have a double cappuccino, half-caf, non-fat milk, with enough foam to be aesthetically pleasing but not leave me with a moustache.”)

Julia deserves a run as long as her original series, a quiet delight in these troubled times.

Julia, streaming on Foxtel On Demand.