'Julia' takes on a new side of Julia Child — the challenges of newfound fame

I don't know whether Julia Child was uncomfortable being famous or not. I don't know whether she struggled with what we would now call parasocial relationships with her viewers or not. But the new HBO MAX series Julia is, more than any other single thing, about this. It posits that for a woman who was well into middle age when she became a capital-P Personality, that transition was uncomfortable and complicated – and not always one she managed gracefully.

Played in this series by Sarah Lancashire, Julia Child had been employed in the intelligence world before she published in 1961, when, her public television show that ran for ten years. While , the book that became the movie that is probably the best-known rendition of Child's life, focused on the time before the publication of , follows the early part of her television career, and thus a different period of her life: She was already highly successful because of the book; this is the time when she became not only successful but famous. The television kind of famous, not the book kind – and those were very different, even in the 1960s.