The plotline helps trace the cyclical patterns of poverty and abuse back a generation, but it also sets up a neat bit of casting: Qualley stars alongside her own mother, the actress Andie MacDowell-an odd choice for a show about a woman who lacks the kind of safety net a well-connected parent provides, but an effective one. And to expand the story for the screen, Netflix’s Maid makes a more substantive presence of Alex’s mother, Paula. (While there is a Fisher Island in Washington, it’s uninhabited Maid’s version is closer to Seattle’s neighboring Bainbridge.) Some figures have their names changed, while others are omitted entirely. Metzler and her writers kept the Washington state locale, but switched the location from Port Townsend to the fictional town of Port Hampstead, near the wealthy hamlet of Fisher Island. Loosely adapted from Stephanie Land’s 2019 memoir by playwright Molly Smith Metzler, Maid tweaks many details of Land’s true story. Maid is the individual story of an overlapping set of structural problems, showing how the spiral of downward mobility is only accelerated by factors like gender, parenthood, and mental health. Over 10 episodes, Maid tells the kind of story that’s still rare to see from the gatekept realms of Hollywood: an unflinching look at what it means to be poor. Instead, they’re dreamlike reprieves from a story that’s otherwise crushingly down-to-earth. These vignettes aren’t actual depictions of what’s happening to Qualley’s Alex, a young woman who flees an abusive relationship to start a new life for herself and her daughter. And when she hits a low point late in the series, she literally disappears into her couch, falling to the bottom of a black pit where she stays for most of the episode. When Margaret Qualley’s cash-strapped single mom shows up to the supermarket with food stamps, she hears the cashier call for “cleanup on aisle poor.” When she goes to court to fight for custody of her toddler, the judge and her ex’s lawyer simply repeat the word “legal” at each other ad nauseam. To illustrate the plight of its heroine and the vivid imagination she uses to cope, the Netflix limited series takes an occasional turn for the surreal.
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