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If you stick with “Maid,” though, it will be because of Qualley, who is onscreen virtually every minute. On the female side are Alex’s mother, Paula (Andie MacDowell, Qualley’s mother), a bipolar free spirit and narcissist who is an enormous burden on Alex, along with two women who throw out life lines: Denise (BJ Harrison), the manager of a domestic violence shelter, and Regina (Anika Noni Rose), a testy, tightly wound lawyer whose house Alex cleans. On the male side are Maddy’s father, Sean (Nick Robinson), and grandfather, Hank (Billy Burke), both with addiction and anger issues, whose violence has had the largest role in derailing Alex’s life. In “Maid,” that plot is built around two opposed sets of characters, divided by gender.
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You don’t get the feeling that Metzler or her fellow executive producer John Wells (“The West Wing,” among others) were that engaged by the maid angle, or spent much time thinking about how to incorporate it organically into a standard television drama plot. But they’re not as central as they could be - they tend to be there to embellish or illustrate other, more melodramatic story lines. It’s not that the physical toll and meager payoff of Alex’s work, or her observations about the lives and houses of her clients, don’t get screen time. Slightly lost, or diminished, in the reimagining is the central place of housecleaning itself, and the critique of the class and economic structures that can put a working single mother in a nearly inescapable box. It may move you, but it won’t surprise you. The material dealing directly with domestic violence is also more well meaning than dramatic. It’s too bad, though, that the expansions on Land’s tale tend toward clichéd story lines involving mental illness, alcoholism and recovery - worthwhile and sometimes well-made but utterly familiar.
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It was adapted from Stephanie Land’s memoir “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive” by Molly Smith Metzler, a writer and producer whose credits include “Orange Is the New Black” and “Shameless.” A counter pops up onscreen with a running tally of Alex’s diminishing funds when she’s pumping gas or making agonizing purchasing decisions in a convenience store.Īnd “Maid” itself can be a frustrating experience, sometimes moving and convincing, sometimes scattered and trite.
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They move in and out of domestic violence shelters, halfway houses, friends’ and relatives’ homes and, for a particularly dismal spell, back into the trailer. She and Maddy are about to be homeless for the first time, but not the last.Īcross the 10 roughly hourlong episodes of “Maid,” premiering Friday on Netflix, Alex (Margaret Qualley) and Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) undertake a bitter, circular, hugely frustrating journey through the precincts of poverty. When she’s sure he’s asleep, she gathers their 2-year-old daughter, Maddy, and tiptoes out of the mobile home they share. Alex, a 25-year-old aspiring writer living north of Seattle, lies awake watching the man who just ended an argument with her by punching a hole in a wall. “Maid” begins just after the last straw has been broken.