Julia season 2 review: A tasty, overloaded second helping

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