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Julia… Julia Child… she became a famous chef, and when we first see her, she’s cooked a massive amount of food for a dinner party, making me wonder how she managed to keep it hot all at the same time.
Her career started – and she became known as ‘The French Chef’ – because she worked in France, wrote a cookbook and now has an offer to get it published. A year on, and she’s touting her cookbook on US chatshows, and making an omlette live on air, which doesn’t quite go to plan, but her incidents and accidents endear her to the nation’s viewers.
I never watched Meryl Streep’s 2009 movie, Julie & Julia, but based on any clips I’ve seen, Sarah Lancashire (Talking Heads – An Ordinary Woman) looks a lot more like Ms Child than Ms Streep did.
Fans of Cheers and Frasier will welcome the fact that not only is David Hyde Pierce (Niles Crane) playing her husband, Paul – also a budding artist, but Bebe Neuwirth, who played Frasier’s wife, Lilith, in Cheers – and later sleeping with Niles in the sitcom Frasier, is Julia’s neighbour and best friend, Avis DeVoto.
However, it feels like it takes forever before she gets anything in front of a TV screen – putting in a request to get her own “educational cooking show” along the way – and eventually securing a trial episode, but it takes some convincing to the TV bosses for this to happen – and it takes until the second episode of this drama before she actually records her first, but as we know, she had a long career afterwards.
Personally, Julia Child was long before my time, and for this drama, it’s watchable, but while it seems to be going down a storm after the first three episodes aired on HBO Max, I’m really not getting this. I managed two episodes and it’s just in one eye and out the other.
Julia is on Sky Atlantic from Tuesday April 12th, but isn’t yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD. I’m not sure how many episodes are available at launch, but there were 3 in the first week on HBO Max, and then weekly after that.
Check out the trailer below:
Episode 1-2 Score: Meh.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 45-50 per episode
Release date: April 12th 2022
Studio: Sky Atlantic / HBO Max
Format: 2.00:1
Series Directors: Jenée LaMarque, Melanie Mayron, Charles McDougall, Erica Dunton, Scott Ellis
Producers: Donna E Bloom, Denise Pinckley
Creator: Daniel Goldfarb
Writers: Daniel Goldfarb, Eboni Booth, Natalia Temesgen, Emily Bensinger, Erica Lipez
Music: Jeff Danna, Shirley Song
Cast:
Julia Child: Sarah Lancashire
Paul Child: David Hyde Pierce
Avis DeVoto: Bebe Neuwirth
Alice Naman: Brittany Bradford
Russ Morash: Fran Kranz
Judith Jones: Fiona Glascott
Control Room Tech, Core: Rob Lévesque
Control Room Director: Howard Breslau
Ralph: Matthew Malone
Roland: Charlie Thurston
Dorothy Zinberg: Lindsey Broad
Benny: Michael Malvesti
Chaz: Dennis Staroselsky
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.