Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Margaret Qualley is one of those actors who has been showing up in high quality projects for the last few years (Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Fosse/Verdon, The Leftovers). For the most part, though, despite her fine performances over the years, she still might be more widely known as Andie MacDowell’s daughter than anything else. With Maid, however, that’s about to change. We usually never call a role a “star-making turn,” but Qualley’s performance in Maid is pretty damned close to that. Read on for more.
MAID: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: In the middle of the night, a woman watches as her partner lies on his back, asleep.
The Gist: Alex Russell (Margaret Qualley) is watching Sean (Nick Robinson) because she is looking for a good time to make her escape. She slinks out of bed, grabs a bag and picks their daughter Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) out of bed. She and Maddy get in the car and speed away, just as Sean gets wise to what Alex is doing. She has $18 to her name.
Flashbacks show us why Alex is leaving; the night before, Sean got so drunk that he threw a glass jar at her and punched a hole in their trailer wall. Alex, scared out of her wits for both her and Maddy’s safety, thinks it’s time to leave before either of them get seriously hurt. Finding a place to sleep proves to be problematic, so she stops in a park and they sleep in the car.
The next day, Alex applies for subsidized housing, but the social worker tells her she needs a job. Given that Alex doesn’t have much experience beyond being Maddy’s mom, the social worker helps her out by giving her the name of a maid service looking for workers.
In order to go on the job interview, though, she needs someone to watch Maddy. Reluctantly, she goes and visits her mother’s house; she’s not there, having rented it out to Airbnb people. She finds her artist mom Paula (Andie MacDowell) shacking up with an Aussie dude named Basil (Toby Levins) in an RV. Alex’s reluctance has to do with her mother’s narcissism and instability, especially when she’s off her meds, but she has no other choice.
When she goes to the maid service, the boss, Yolanda (Tracy Vilar), gives her a job to do immediately… on Fisher Island. She’ll have to pay for her uniform, cleaning supplies and the gas and ferry tolls. The Dyson Yolanda gives her has to be back by the end of the shift or she doesn’t get paid. Alex tries to get in touch with Paula but her mom talks over her on the phone about Maddy’s cute finger painting and doesn’t hear that she’s going to be gone until late.
At the massive house of her customer Regina (Anika Noni Rose), Alex passes out in the amazing kids’ room, fantasizing about what it would be like if Maddy lived there. When she goes to pick Maddy up, she finds her mother ranting and raving, Basil is napping, and Maddy is gone. When Paula got tired of babysitting, they called the last person Alex wanted to deal with: Sean. Now he has to go back, deal with him, retrieve Maddy, and leave him all over again.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Even though the situations are different, both Maid and another show that John Wells produces, Shameless, mines struggling to make ends meet for humor as well as drama.
Our Take: Maid (stylized as MAID by Netflix) is based on Stephanie Land’s memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive; even though the story is fictionalized, you can tell that Wells, who also directed the first episode, and the show’s creator, Molly Smith Metzler, wanted to hew as close to Land’s story as possible. The story is fictional but feels as real as fiction can get, with a biting sense of humor to offset some of the more dramatic and dark aspects of the first episode.
Considering she’s in virtually every scene, Qualley is up to the task of playing Alex. She’s trying to be strong for Maddy, but she’s trying to be strong for herself, too; she knows that staying with Sean would be the easy choice, and being on her own is going to be way more difficult for her and her daughter. But the determined look Qualley gives Alex throughout the episode, despite the emotions roiling just underneath the surface, shows that Alex has that inner strength.
The snark she does spew out — when the social worker asks if she has proof that she’s Maddy’s mom she says, “I can show you my stretch marks” — is completely natural given how she plays Alex in the face of all the adversity. In her scenes with MacDowell, Qualley’s real-life mom, there is a natural rapport that isn’t always there when real-life mothers and daughters share scenes. It helps that MacDowell, who has come such a long way as an actor since her debut 32 years ago, hits just the right tone with Paula’s mental illness; she’s grandiose at times, angry and bitter at others, and is believable when rocketing between the two.
The first episode really had us sitting up, intrigued about how Alex’s story is going to play out, one filthy toilet at a time, and that’s thanks mostly to Qualley, with an assist from MacDowell and the rest of the supporting cast.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: A series of events, starting with Maddy losing her dollar-store Ariel doll on a highway median, leads Alex to get a ride from her estranged dad Hank (Billy Burke). She tells him to drop them off at the ferry terminal. There, with Maddy and the Dyson in tow, Alex hunkers down for the night, while the crowd on the last ferry of the night passes her by.
Sleeper Star: We’ve already mentioned MacDowell’s fine performance, but we’re also looking forward to seeing Rose as Regina, who seems to have her own set of troubles despite her wealth, and Vilar as Yolanda, Alex’s take-no-shit boss.
Most Pilot-y Line: The character of Basil, who Alex jokingly calls “Oregano”, seems to be the most superfluous one so far; he says he was born in Perth, but we’re with Alex and we think his Australian accent is malarkey.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Because of Qualley’s Emmy-worthy performance, Maid has the potential to be one of the more satisfying shows to watch in 2021.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
