TV Review - Maid (2021)

Based on Stephanie Land's 2019 memoir, which was a best-seller, this series was created by Molly Smith Metzler (Shameless and Orange Is the New Black). It's essentially a true story that documents about a year or so of a young single mother's life. It follows the single mother, as she escapes her violent boyfriend and struggles with homelessness and severe poverty. The series is ostensibly about domestic abuse and how female survivors, especially those with children deal with that issue. The series is also about child care. If one has been paying attention to politics, one knows that President Joe Biden is championing the Build Back Better Act in Congress, which has provisions for child care. Members of the Democratic Party who label themselves as Progressives wanted more provisions for child care and paid family leave, as part of what's been called human infrastructure. Moderate or conservative Democrats wanted less provisions. If ever there were a brilliant and heartbreaking argument to be made for those provisions, it's this series.

Margaret Qualley (Fosse/Verdon and The Leftovers) stars as Alex Russell, a woman in her early 20's who has a daughter who's only a toddler. She lives with her boyfriend and father to her daughter in a trailer in the American northwest, somewhere in Washington state. One night, she makes the decision to wait till her boyfriend falls asleep and takes her daughter out of that trailer. She decides to run away from him. Unfortunately, she has no money or very little. She doesn't have a job because presumably she's a stay-at-home mom, having abandoned going to college because she got pregnant and chose to keep the baby, relying financially solely on her boyfriend.

Nick Robinson (A Teacher and Melissa & Joey) co-stars as Sean Boyd, the boyfriend to Alex and father of her child. He's an aspiring carpenter, but he currently works as a bartender. It's ironic because he's also revealed to be an alcoholic. The reasons for his alcoholism don't come out until later, but he occasionally will get into a drunken rage and lose his temper. He has done violent things that has resulted in physical damage. He hasn't physically hit Alex or his daughter, but he's done things like thrown objects and break glass. He's punched holes in walls. This has increasingly scared Alex to the point that she has to get away from him.

When she does get away, she has nothing, except her 3-year-old daughter Maddy. We follow her, as she goes to a homeless shelter and recover or find a way to stand on her own two feet. Actually, she doesn't just go to a regular or traditional, homeless shelter. She goes to a shelter for women of domestic violence or DV. When it comes to DV shelters, there are rules and guidelines. Metzler's series basically walks us through the rules and guidelines, as well as the culture within that particular shelter and what women go through. We see the counseling they get, the community they build and how much of a vicious cycle it can be where women who leave often come back.

Anika Noni Rose (The Princess and the Frog and Dreamgirls) also co-stars as Regina, a wealthy attorney who lives in a large, fancy house on an island that's off the coast of Washington state. The island is filled with wealthy residents and one can only get there using a ferry boat. However, Regina uses a maid service called Value Maids. When Alex gets a job at Value Maids, Regina becomes a regular client, mainly because Alex does incredible work. Regina seems very much like a snob and dismissive, but Regina does recognize Alex's good work. The two also eventually bond over the fact that Regina is about to have a baby or is planning to have one, though she's not pregnant. Regina struggles with motherhood, despite being wealthy and having infinite resources, whereas Alex is a great mother, despite having no resources.

It's an interesting dynamic between Alex and Regina, specifically because Regina is African-American. It's a bit of a subversion to have the maid be a white woman and have the wealthy person be Black. It's based on a true story, so that dynamic is probably true. The woman who runs the homeless shelter, Denise, played by BJ Harrison, is also a Black woman. It's just a clear example of how this woman was saved by Black women. They're not featured as much, but the Black women are given the space to flesh out their characters, even if ever so briefly.

Andie MacDowell (Four Weddings and a Funeral and Groundhog Day) plays Paula, the mother to Alex. She's an artist who mainly does painting but also various crafts. She's not involved with Alex's father. She's instead involved with a younger man who is Australian but Alex doubts that. Paula otherwise is very much like a modern-day hippie. She probably was raised by hippies. She's very flighty and free-spirited. She at times feels manic and perhaps suffering from a mental illness. MacDowell's performance feels like it's the comic relief for this series. However, MacDowell's performance becomes wholly something else by the end and what one might think is mental illness is something else and it's powerfully expressed here.

Each episode is centered around a different house in the area that Alex has to clean. Interestingly, each house she cleans sheds some light on who Alex is and what she's experiencing personally or what she has experienced. In a lot of ways, this series feels like several films about a homeless person struggling to keep their head above water, such as The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), Imperial Dreams (2016) and Goldie (2020). There's an energy to this series overall and even to the individual episodes that feels kinetic and as if Alex is always on the move and constantly juggling. Yet, the series, which is mostly directed by John Wells, is able to take time to dig into her and make us feel what's going on in her head, using cinematic tricks as simple as text on the screen. Literally, her accounting ledger appears on screen. We also get fantasy sequences that are fun and at times haunting.

Don't be swayed because it's not all serious and depressing here. This series does manage to inject some fun and comical moments. The recurrence of Salt-N-Pepa's song "Shoop" was great. There's even a silly and still sexy moment involving a friend of Alex's named Nate, played by Raymond Ablack (Ginny & Georgia and Degrassi: The Next Generation). Strangely, as I was watching this series, I was reminded of two Oscar-winning films, Parasite (2019) and Nomadland (2021). It's not in a derivative way, but a refreshing way, as this series brilliantly tackles issues inherent in both those films, including class struggle and the effects of poverty. It's no question one of the best series of the year.

Rated TV-MA for language and smoking.
Running Time: 1 hr. / 10 eps.

Available on Netflix.