TV review: Maid is authentic and tough-going, with dignity and resilience

I didn’t start watching Maid on Netflix, my wife did. I heard her describe it as the story of a young woman trying to escape domestic abuse and thought it was just a bit dark for my taste in late October. So I read while my wife binged it, or sometimes just dozed on the couch when it was on.

Except I didn’t really doze. The story and the acting are just too good. 

I experienced it as a radio play for a while, listening to the lead character Alex (Margaret Qualley) and her two-year-old daughter Maddy , dealing with emotional abuse from her partner Sean. 

Alex’s mother (played by Qualley’s real-life mother Andie MacDowell) is in my ear as well, a flighty ‘free-spirit’ who seems more interested in pretending to be an artist than helping out her daughter and grand-daughter.

The conversations between these three generations of women drew me in. The love and tenderness and despair and frustration were there in their voices, long before I joined my wife as a viewer.

Alex takes Maddy and leaves Sean, ending up in what feels like an hourly struggle to earn enough money to put a roof over their heads. Everywhere seems incredibly damp and cold. Her cleaning job is demeaning at times, the welfare system is stacked against her, the legal fight for custody of Maddy left me feeling drained. There isn’t any poverty porn on view —  it’s her dignity and resilience and tenderness keep the show on the road. It’s her story.

She visits her estranged father, remarried and comfortably suburban, and you wonder why she doesn’t take up his offer to move in with him. I was pretty much shouting ‘do it’ just to give her some relief, but it turned out she was right to resist the temptation.

If this all sounds miserable, it isn’t. There are plenty fun, love and tender moments — all authentic — to give a real-life tone across 10 episodes. It felt like I was in the car with Alex and Maddy when they were driving along, singing their songs. Those bits were a joy to watch.

But they don’t obscure the strain of life as a single mother on a low income, and I don’t think they’re supposed to. The whole point of Maid is to show how it feels to be Alex , rather than how it is. It works because Margaret Qualley is just brilliant at showing rather than telling us how she feels. It’s in her face, her demeanour, I could hear it in her voice before I opened my eyes.

Maid is tough going, but it’s supposed to be. There’s nothing overly gruesome in it, the abuse is frightening, but it’s banal as well, showing that it could happen anywhere.

I was wrong about Maid — it’s a perfect watch for late October, particularly if you are gorging on the prosperity porn in Succession as well. So open your eyes and take a look.