Maid reveals the grinding lives of America’s working poor

This streaming series finds a willing market for a story centred on the struggle faced by many women.

Margaret Qualley as Alex and Rylea Nevaeh Whittet as her daughter Maddy in Maid.

It’s rare for a drama about domestic abuse to become the television equivalent of box office gold. However, the Netflix series Maid has done just that. According to the streaming behemoth, the limited series was watched by almost 67 million households in the four weeks after it was released last month, surpassing a miniseries record set by 2020’s surprise hit, The Queen’s Gambit.

Maid tells the story of Alex (Margaret Qualley), a 23-year-old single mother who flees domestic violence and struggles to make ends meet while working as a cleaner for middle class clients. As Alex’s anxious mental calculations about whether she has enough to pay for groceries or petrol flash up on the screen, we are reminded of the grinding arithmetic of poverty for America’s working poor.

As the drama opens, Alex is living in a trailer home with her partner Sean (Nick Robinson) and their charming two-year-old Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet). Sean is a bartender and the sole breadwinner, but his excessive drinking is blurring into alcoholism.When drunk, he turns violent, driving his fists into the walls of the family’s home. He doesn’t hit his wife or daughter, but for Alex, picking out shards of smashed glass from Maddy’s hair after one of Sean’s benders is the last straw. Although she has no job or family support, she leaves.

Maid offers a compelling, granular portrait of Alex’s battles with insecure work, housing and the welfare bureaucracy as she tries to get by with part-time cleaning jobs and government benefits. She initially denies she is a domestic violence victim, telling a social worker she hasn’t been “abused for real”.

Interestingly, Maid is not the only current drama about a domestic violence victim who is in denial about her predicament. Cry Wolf, a Danish work devised by Borgen creator Maja Jul Larsen, is screening on SBS on Demand, and begins with a 14-year-old accusing her stepfather of physical abuse. Even after their children are abruptly removed, the parents deny the accusation and this drama tackles the mystery of who is telling the truth.

Maid explores Alex’s psychological awakening as she moves, in fits and starts, towards her goal of creating a better life for herself and her toddler. As she and Maddy move from a domestic violence shelter to a tiny apartment with a dangerous mould problem, Maid highlights the perverse financial logic that encourages abused mothers to return to violent partners, just so basic bills can be paid and their children have a permanent roof over their heads.

The series, overseen by showrunner Molly Smith Metzler, is an indictment of America’s convoluted welfare system and exploitative, low-wage economy: In one scene, a client who lives in a waterfront mansion initially refuses to pay Alex for three hours’ cleaning because a sponge left streaks on the sun loungers. This drama’s extraordinary popularity is undoubtedly enhanced by the fact it is based on a real story: it’s inspired by a memoir by American author Stephanie Land, who fled domestic violence with a young daughter and then worked as cleaner. Land wrote about her experiences in her 2019 New York Times bestseller, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. Barack Obama included the memoir on his summer reading list, describing it as an “unflinching look at America’s class divide’’.

Land’s is – literally – a rags to riches story. Intriguingly though, in the small-screen version, key aspects of her story have been changed to make Alex younger, more vulnerable and arguably more palatable to a mass audience. While Alex grows up in poverty with an absent father and bipolar mother with revolving door-boyfriends, Land was raised in a stable, middle-class home. “I was loved, cared for and provided for,’’ she writes on her website, explaining that she went to church, performed in plays and had a dog and two cats.

At 20, Alex gives up the chance to go to university when she gives birth to Maddy. Land didn’t have her first child until she was 29, and fled her partner’s violence soon after. At 35, the single mother had a second child, although there was no permanent partner. She started university with a scholarship for domestic abuse survivors. Even so, she has written in The Guardian about how she maxed out her student loans to $US60,000. In contrast, Alex’s desire to attend university is presented as a relatively uncomplicated financial proposition.

Land finished her English degree, started writing freelance articles about her life as a cleaner and the book and Netflix deal followed. Today, she is a 43-year-old married mother of three with her own home. Her story is ultimately redemptive, but it’s noteworthy that for the TV drama, her complex history has been reconfigured to fit a Hollywood-style narrative of a plucky young heroine crossing class against overwhelming odds.

Andie MacDowell – Qualley’s mother in real life – excels in the role of Paula, Alex’s “batshit crazy” mother, stealing every scene she is in. Qualley, meanwhile, captures Alex’s vulnerability but lacks the rougher edges one might expect from a character with a mentally ill mother, estranged father and abusive boyfriend.

Irritatingly, Qualley’s Alex is a poster girl for single-mum attachment parenting – she never loses her temper or tires of playing preschooler games with Maddy, who throws remarkably few tantrums. This is a far cry from Land’s honest admission that when her first daughter was in kindergarten, “we’d scream at each other in our fight to get out the door’’. Alex is, however, not the perfect victim: at one stage she loses her cleaning job because she effectively steals from a client. Another strength of this series is that it doesn’t write off the male characters. He is a domestic abuser, yet Sean’s parenting skills and attempts to tackle his alcoholism are presented sympathetically.

At 10 episodes, Maid is, like some of Alex’s poorly-paid cleaning shifts, too long. But this unlikely hit is a revealing portrait of insidious domestic abuse and of how unskilled Americans are often condemned to lives that turn them from a class of working people into a permanent underclass.