Julia season 2 review: A tasty, overloaded second helping

Let’s get it out of the way: Yes, Julia Child is as horny as ever.

It was a surprising character detail revealed in the first season of Julia, Max’s biographical dramedy on the celebrity chef and cookbook author who revolutionized the way the world eats, especially for a beloved public figure better known for her love of butter, her lofty height, or the way her iconically lilting voice would yodel around words like “boeuf bourguignon.” This was a woman we associate with hunger, sure, but not specifically carnal hunger.

The second season, which premieres its first three episodes on November 16, follows the recipe set by its predecessor and serves up more than a few instances of Julia (Sarah Lancashire, still great) and her adoring husband Paul (David Hyde Pierce) in the throes, whether at a hotel in Paris or their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s a behind-the-scenes humanity not readily available on Child’s Wikipedia page or in other onscreen depictions of the culinary star (the most famous, besides the chef’s own televised cooking lessons, being Meryl Streep’s Golden Globe-winning turn in 2009’s Julie & Julia).

That’s been the premise—the promise, really—of this elongated peek into Child’s life, love, and work. (Season two, like the first, encompasses eight episodes that hover around the 45-minute mark, each entitled for a dish in Julia’s oeuvre, from “Loup En Croûte” to “Lobster Américaine.”) We’re able to sink our forks into those shockingly intimate moments, into the real-life personality beyond that famous “Bon Appétit!” rally cry, into the flesh-and-blood woman whose feet hurt and whose feelings sting and who, yes, likes to boink her husband on the regular.

Julia season two makes room at the table for those intimate insights, especially when depicting the growing pains of Child’s celebrity, as her rising notoriety takes her from the WGBH studio all the way to the White House and sees her encountering everything from product placements to political probing into her and Paul’s history. But the table becomes so cluttered this time around, with side dishes of foreign settings (the premiere whisks us off to the French Riviera), new characters, and fresh storylines for the returning ones, that we’re left hungry for the main dish: simply, more Julia.

Not that those side dishes aren’t delicious. That Riviera-set season opener is one hell of an amuse bouche: languid days of Julia and her cookbook co-author Simca (Isabella Rosselini) biking around the scenic French countryside with leek stalks and fresh baguettes poking out of their shopping bags; Paul painting alfresco in a straw hat and unbuttoned linen; James Beard (Christian Clemenson) popping by—with Stockard Channing!—to crisp up some fried chicken. Plot-wise, it’s not exactly juicy stuff, but it’s an atmospheric feast. (Creator Daniel Goldfarb was a producer on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and both series are equally enamored with period-perfect production design.)

The story gets moving, though, when Julia & Co. return to the States to cook up more episodes of The French Chef for the Boston-based public television station. Having counted the days since her shining star has been gone (72, to be exact), Julia’s producer Alice Naman (Brittany Bradford) is thrilled by her grand return: “You have no idea what it’s been like without you. I’m one girl in a sea of men!” Graciously, Alice gets even more female reinforcement onset with the hire of the show’s new director, Elaine Levitch (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend multi-talent Rachel Bloom), while the program’s previous helmer Russ Morash (Fran Kranz) is off making long-winded documentaries.

Alice and Elaine find much-welcome camaraderie in each other as women of ambition living in the sexism-laden ’60s—even collaborating on a new series called For Women, By Women—but to Julia, Elaine is competition. It’s an interesting polarity not only for the character but for the woman herself: For how progressive Child was in many ways, she’s notably prickly under another woman’s direction. “The world isn’t very kind to women, is it?” Julia simplistically tells Alice at one point, to which the latter reminds her: “No, most of us can’t do anything about it. But you have a spotlight.”

There’s seemingly little room to share in that spotlight, though, with Julia failing to treat its fellow female characters with the same depth that it does its grand dame of cooking; their plates simply aren’t as nourishing, at no fault to the performers.

Where other characters can often feel more like set-pieces than living, breathing humans, Brittany Bradford’s Alice is one of the livelier, more believable personas (despite being entirely fictional), and yet her own struggles this season—from the anxieties of trying to replicate the success of The French Chef at the behest of her male studio bosses to the frustration of navigating the realities of birth control years before the sexual revolution—feel less like their own substantial courses and more like items being checked off an ingredients list. (That’s not even touching on the way the series continues to sidestep the intersectionality of Alice’s experience as a young Black woman in mid-century America.)

The publishing-focused tangents of Fiona Glascott’s Judith Jones and Judith Light’s Blanche Knopf feel like they’re part of a different menu entirely. The only one who makes a real meal out of their morsels is Bebe Neuwirth as Julia’s delightfully acidic BFF Avis DeVoto, who digs into a sweet new romance, the frustrations of female friendship, and philosophical sit-downs with Jean-Paul Sartre himself with relish.

“The flaws were the show’s greatest strength. Never cut, never start over. You’ll miss something distinctly Julia,” Russ advises Elaine in directing The French Chef. And the same could be said for Julia itself: Things are never perfect but it’s still a meal worth having, such a distinctly sweet and sumptuous thing that you likely won’t even notice the bloat until long after it’s over.

Julia season 2 premieres November 16 on Max