‘Julia’ Teaser: Julia Child Visits Paris & Cooks for White House in Season 2 (VIDEO)

Julia Child‘s fame reaches new, possibly unmanageable heights in Max‘s first teaser for Julia Season 2. Sarah Lancashire returns as the titular chef in the charming series, which is officially coming back on Thursday, November 16. Season 1 debuted in March 2022.

With her trailblazing cooking show up and running on the air, Julia grapples with her rising celebrity and what that means for her, her colleagues and her show. In Julia Season 2, Julia and her devoted husband Paul (David Hyde Pierce) return from Simca’s (Isabella Rossellini) home in France to find that her success has changed everything. Through her singular joie de vivre, she and her team must navigate WGBH, the White House, and a threat from their past, while continuing to spearhead female-driven public television and confront social issues still prevalent today.

Bebe Neuwirth‘s Avis has a new love interest in the trailer above, which seems to cause some problems for her relationship with Julia. “Friendship is a two-way street,” Avis tells Julia in one snippet of the teaser. Brittany Bradford‘s Alice is also charged with maintaining and growing WGBH’s success as the network demands more from her and Julia’s hit cooking show. “My board was content with nothing when all we had was nothing, but now that we have something, we want more something and less nothing,” a network exec tells Robert Joy‘s Hunter Fox, the WGBH boss.

Sarah Lancashire as Julia Child in key art for 'Julia' Season 2

Courtesy of Max

Fran Kranz‘s Russ doesn’t seem to understand the pressure Alice is under to, as she describes, save the network. And with its growing audience comes a demand for higher profits from the network’s higher-ups, which leads to a comedic trial-and-error with product placement on The French Chef.

To get a break from it all, Paul takes Julia to Paris. But the pressures of life follow them there as Fiona Glascott‘s Judith complains about having “to play referee” between Julia and someone close to them both. Back in New York, Judith Light‘s famed editor Blanche Knopf tells Judith, “If you feel like a punching bag, you’ve never been punched, my dear.”

As CBS tries to poach The French Chef from WGBH, Alice lands a special event for the show at the White House that will see Julia cooking in the White House kitchen. Can the show, and the relationships of the people running it, withstand all the pressures of fame?

Julia Season 2 will debut with three episodes on Thursday, November 16 on Max, followed by one episode weekly through December 21. The series is produced by Lionsgate and 3 Arts Entertainment. Chris Keyser serves as showrunner, as well as executive producer alongside creator Daniel Goldfarb. Erwin Stoff of 3 Arts Entertainment, Kimberly Carver, Charles McDougall, Donna Bloom and Erica Lipez also executive produce. Todd Schulkin is a consulting producer on behalf of The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.

Julia, Season 2 Premieres Thursday, November 16, Max