‘Julia’ Season 2: Behind Shooting in France & Who Rachel Bloom’s New Character Is Named After
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the first three episodes of Julia Season 2.]
If there’s a show that makes you want to eat while watching, it’s Max‘s deliciously fun Julia. Given the show is a comedy series about the early television career of infamous chef Julia Child (played with perfection by Sarah Lancashire), food does tend to come up once in awhile and is what the creative forces behind the show want it to be.
“Our desire [is for] you to watch the show and feel as if you’re watching a souffle and then you realize that there’s something underneath it that’s presenting a little bit of a message,” says executive producer Chris Keyser.
Based on the first three episodes of Season 2 that dropped today, juicy is a good word to describe what unfolds with Julia, salty husband Paul (David Hyde Pierce, pitch perfect), Julia’s ambitious editor Judith Jones (Fiona Glascott), and Julia’s saucy pal Mavis (Bebe Neuwirth) spending time in France. Each character starts Season 2 at a place of professional and/or personal change, which is the second season theme. Julia and Paul, for example, are trying to find a good place in their marriage as well as Paul figuring out his place in the shadows somewhat as Julia’s fame explodes.
“Season 2 is a little bit more about Paul figuring out who he is in the context of that. And that’s an arc that plays out all the way through from the first to the last episode [of Season 2], who am I? And now obviously, a little bit in the shadows,” explains Keyser. An upcoming episode featuring a visit from Paul’s brother opens up that conversation more, he adds, and whether living in the shadows is something Paul can be content with.
Also, shooting three episodes (two in Provence and one in Paris) was a great time for everyone involved, but the work came in not showing the France TV and film watchers are used to seeing. “We wanted to show a different kind, not your iconic touristic Paris,” says producer Donna E. Bloom. “We tried to show Paris the way Parisians live it.” Locations seen in these episodes include the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, Place Dauphine Cafe, Place Louis Aragon (Ile Saint Louis), Rue Le Regrattier (Ile Saint Louis), and Rue Payenne.
Also, given the early ’60s era of the show at the start of the second season, Keyser adds they wanted to show how the world was going through change as seen in the third episode’s more dramatic story about Julia and Paul trying to find former friends who left Paris following prejudice due to their being Jewish.
“The first couple of episodes are about the long-term effect of what it meant for those who had been in the generation that fought World War II, both Europeans and Americans, to look back on that at this point.” He also states that “there are these themes underneath that we’re trying to layer through in those early episodes. Then Julia comes back to Boston and then we move forward with the rest of the series. But this is the end of a meaningful chapter in her life.”
Speaking of Boston’s WGBH television station, the show spends ample time there while Julia and Paul are in France. First off was meeting Rachel Bloom‘s new character, Elaine Levitch, a strong-spirited woman who comes in to work alongside producer Alice Naman (Brittany Bradford) on Julia’s show. “We named her Elaine, inspired by [comedy writer/performer] Elaine May,” says executive producer Daniel Goldfarb. “Rachel luckily was a fan of the show and wanted to be a part of it, and we got her and she’s just so dynamic and has such charisma.”
The addition of another woman at the PBS station is reflective of the 1960s when Julia Child’s real show was blowing up, adds Goldfarb. “We did our research and we went to GBH and spoke to them. They let us know that by the time The French Chef went off the air in the mid ’70s, 75 percent of the people working at WGBH were women.” Watch for some head-butting to come later this season between Elaine and Julia as Elaine works to continue shape her show. “Julia was a trailblazing feminist, but she also had some old fashioned ideas about women, and we wanted to dramatize that dichotomy and that complexity.”
Given the series is grounded in a very real world revolving around Julia, expect to see more characterizations of real people throughout Season 2 like writer/future Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown promoting her groundbreaking book Sex and the Single Girl in the third episode. “From the research, [the real] Julia’s orbit were all of these people, and we had so much fun dramatizing them. So we tried to lean into it and have more fun with it in the second season,” says Goldfarb. We’ll see returns of writer John Updike (Bryce Pinkman) and chef James Beard (Christian Clemenson), who appeared in the first season as well as other influential people from the 1960s era like civil rights activist Zephyr Wright. The producers also teased a surprise food guest that we’ll see by the end of the season.
Sounds like a delectable meal of great TV to us!
Julia, Thursdays, Max
