‘Julia’ Should Not Have Been Canceled By Max

I miss dinner parties. I miss the luxury of sitting around a candlelit table sharing a bottle of wine and a conversation that winds and lulls around the food, around bites of crusty baguette smeared with fig jam and baked brie, mouthfuls of crisp green lettuce coated with a tangy, homemade vinaigrette, twisted forkfuls of pasta coated with a light marinara, freshly grated Parmesan, and specks of green basil.

Instead of this type of long, decadent dinner that is enjoyed with other adults, my husband and I eat almost exclusively with our 5-year-old and 3-year-old. We devour our food while standing up or swallowing so quickly that it’s hard to taste any of the flavor, trying to finish our meal before one of the kids melts from exhaustion. Our only goal is reduced to getting through the nightly parenting to-do list of eating, bath, books and bed.

It was last winter after checking off that list and collapsing on the couch that my husband and I first found Max’s “Julia.” Despite its 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the show didn’t seem to get a lot of press. And we were even more surprised that we had never heard of it when we realized that most of Season 1’s episodes had already been released because, after the first episode, we were hooked. The fictionalized story of Julia Child starting her show “The French Chef” and becoming The Julia Child became an immersive treat, each episode a taste of those long-forgotten dinner parties that we never wanted to end.

The first season opens in 1961 with Julia (Sarah Lancashire) and her husband Paul (David Hyde Pierce) living in Oslo, Norway. Paul is refreshing the wine. Julia is standing over a sizzling piece of fish. The lighting is dim, the candles are lit, and their house is full of guests celebrating a letter from Judith Jones (Fiona Glascott), an editor at Knopf, that says the publishing house wants to release “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” — a cookbook that Julia co-wrote with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck (Isabella Rossellini), also known as Simca. While Julia’s reading the letter aloud, the phone rings. Paul, a diplomat, is being called back to Washington, where he thinks he will be promoted but is forced to quit and take an early retirement.

This irony — Julia’s career beginning as Paul’s is ending — is the tension that underpins the first season, and becomes even more evident when the show’s pilot jumps forward one year to Julia and Paul living in Cambridge,…