Is Julia a childfree utopia?

Heather Houser on the HBO Max series’ “excess of everything”—except kids.

Where are the childfree utopias on screen? No kids usually signals pain and disaster, whether in realist stories of infertility or science fictions about mysterious diseases sterilizing the population. We haven't seen these narratives since the 1970s, when sitcoms like Laverne and Shirley and The Mary Tyler Moore Show portrayed careers and friendships over motherhood. Two decades later, Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex and the City started off kid-free, but the latter two eventually strapped BabyBjörns onto Rachel, Ross, Miranda, et al. Unless the protagonists are college-aged, as in A Different World, or recent grads, as in Girls and Living Single, parenthood always comes for someone in the ensemble.

Enter Julia. The HBO Max dramedy about Julia Child (Sarah Lancashire) first aired in March 2022 and wrapped its second and final season in December of last year. It spotlights the creation of The French Chef, Child's cooking show that popularized a now-ubiquitous genre and launched the cookbook author into stardom. The series delights in delectables like brioche and homard à l'Américaine, while depicting how projects as small as a dinner plate and as large as a bestselling book can create shared purpose across generations and continents. 

Julia has flaws. Its class scope is limited. Family wealth bankrolls Chef's first season, and Julia and friends order vintage wine and jet off to Paris without financial worry. Most characters are fictionalized real people, but creator Daniel Goldfarb invents Alice (Brittany Bradford), a black producer at WGBH, the studio that produced Chef from 1963 to 1973. Bringing race into the Civil Rights-era narrative is smart, but, preoccupied with gender barriers, the show sidelines racism.

Limitations aside, critics have salivated over the show’s culinary mise-en-scène and gobbled up Julia's repartee with husband Paul (David Hyde Pierce) and friend Avis (Bebe Neuwirth). These reviews miss one of its real novelties, though: nary a child appears in all sixteen episodes. Instead, as the series unfolds—from working out the kinks in Chef's production and finding feminist purpose in season 1, to rekindling French connections and deflecting the FBI through comic hijinks in season 2—a menu of possibilities opens for those without kids.

DIRT GOES TO DINNER