‘Julia’ Bosses Talk Chef’s Fame, Power & More in Season 2
Preview
This scrumptious drama traces Julia Child’s emergence as culinary television trailblazer, but in the second season, the ebulliently eccentric chef (Sarah Lancashire), with the inimitable, octave-spanning warble, still struggles with the torrent of transformations unfolding in the socially turbulent 1960s.
“Julia’s a path breaker and represents the entrepreneurial woman, but she’s also a product of her time. We wanted to capture those contradictions,” says Julia showrunner Chris Keyser. He adds that Julia learns “you can’t stand still” as the winds of change blow. Indeed, Season 2 finds each of the characters facing “the comedy and the drama of finding yourself running headlong into a world that you don’t fully understand anymore.”
On the heels of The French Chef becoming a cultural sensation for once-sleepy Boston public television station WGBH, Julia and husband Paul (David Hyde Pierce) head to France for the summer, where she and Simca Beck (Isabella Rossellini) develop recipes for the follow-up to their blockbuster cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. While Julia believes they need to embrace nouvelle cuisine, the tradition-bound Simca is resistant. In the first episode, they attempt to recreate a Loup on Croûte (juicy sea bass encased in a buttery puff pastry) that they ate during a visit to Paul Bocuse’s game-changing restaurant. The results are less than spectacular.
“Julia and Simca fight and love each other like sisters,” Keyser says. “But Julia’s now famous, and it becomes difficult to change [their] interpersonal dynamic.”
To ease their tension, they throw a freewheeling dinner party at Simca’s charming country house, with guests including Julia’s powerhouse Knopf book editor Judith Jones (the charismatic Fiona Glascott), acclaimed chef James Beard (Christian Clemenson), and suave Belgian troubadour Jacques Brel (Oli Higginson), who attempts to woo the married Judith. “We let our imaginations run wild with some of that, but there’s a kernel of truth,” shares Keyser. “There were famous dinner parties that Simca put together with some remarkable people.”
Back in Boston, Julia’s best friend Avis DeVoto (Bebe Neuwirth) has an intriguing new boyfriend (Danny Burstein), but when things heat up, she flees on a trip to Paris to rendezvous with Julia. WGBH president Hunter Fox (Robert Joy) faces mounting pressure from the bean-counters to create more hits like The French Chef and instructs his staff, including producers Russ Morash (Fran Kranz) and Alice Naman (Brittany Bradford), to come up with fresh ideas.
“No one had these expectations for public television before,” says creator Daniel Goldfarb. “Hunter thinks he’s going to be congratulated for the success of the show, and all of a sudden, his boss is like, ‘Why aren’t your other shows as good?’ The French Chef raised the bar, and that shakes everything up.”
When Julia returns to Boston to start filming Season 2, she discovers that WGBH wants to capitalize on the show’s success with some crass commercialization, “and she’s really not comfortable with it,” reveals Goldfarb. Then she finds herself being secretly courted by executives at CBS, and their pitch is tantalizing. Plus, there’s a dynamic new female director Elaine (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rachel Bloom), who wows the staff but fails to connect with the star.
“At the beginning, Julia represents a full-throated approval of the idea that the more things change, the better things can be,” Keyser says, “and then she finds out the limitations of her ability to change. Her life story is the embrace of many things that for some time she struggled with.” Still, her droll, cheeky humor, and can-do disposition is always on display. Adds Goldfarb, “Julia’s a woman of a certain age with a certain amount of power, and she has to figure out how best to use it.” Bon appetit!
Julia, Season 2 Premiere, Thursday, November 16, Max
