Horatia Alger

 "Maid,"2021 Streaming Series

This limited series follows a theme in recent films and television productions – the working-class servant. Or house-keeper or maid or driver or gardener or nanny or cook or ... It is based on a book sourced from reality, written by Stephanie Land.  Alex, a young woman with a child, Maddie, is emotionally abused by an alcoholic and controlling boyfriend, Sean. She bails from their trailer in the woods with Maddie. The rest of the story concerns their struggle to survive – without skills, without a car, without money. It seems the real proletariat is finally getting some screen-time.

Haulin' the Dyson

The series hits all the snags – complex and massive government paperwork for SNAP, Section 8, housing programs, legal forms, vouchers, child care. Going to confusing law courts. Homelessness, living in cars, on a ferry, a domestic violence shelter. Trying to get transportation, asking for rides, trying to get a car (one which is totaled) so that Alex can get to work … or not. Tough and nasty bosses; thieving co-workers, phone minutes running out, high ferry tolls (she lives in Washington state...), bumming a few dollars, lack of cash, cash, cash.

Alex finally gets a job cleaning rich and middle-class people's houses and runs into hoarders, yappers, rich bitches, bad marriages – the bourgeois gamut. She finally has a topic to write about and begins to keep a journal. She wanted to go to Montana to a writers' program and had received a scholarship and never went. The reason is never revealed.

The people that help her are co-workers sometimes, women in the shelter, an upper-middle class guy who is trying to get her into a relationship, and the aforementioned rich woman who becomes human after having a baby. Her family consists of her over-the-top hippie artist mother, who can barely take care of herself; her seldom-seen father, who abused her mother too; and Sean, who attempts and fails to control his drinking or temper. Her mother is played by Andie McDowell, in a self-centered, scene-crushing role.

A Night on the Ferry to Fisher Island

Alex makes naive mistakes, almost on schedule. She suffers from a form of PTSD, which I guess is one reason why her open-mouthed grin / deer-in-the-headlights look is so frequent. But she's a hard worker, taking the nastiest cleaning jobs. The series never lets those gigs become distant background, to its credit.

The theme of how families repeat abuse, and how abusers get second and third and fourth chances is obvious. Custody is contested twice, but Maddie gets Sean to agree, perhaps an unlikely outcome. At times a money calculator appears on screen to watch in real time how her funds diminish, or rarely increase. She sometimes imagines things or attempts to remember traumatic events. As she puts it in her journal – 9 moves, 338 toilets, 7 government programs and 1 year in the life of her charming 3-year-old. This kid almost never cries, nor awakens even when constantly hugged by Alex like some kind of Teddy Bear.  I don't believe it myself.  

The real theme is that with grit and determination, you too can climb out of the hole you and others have dug. It is a familiar American story. Some do. Many don't. Here the writer sold her personal experience to Netflix, so the assumption is that she succeeded.  And with some key help from rich people - don't forget them.  At least this series does not hide many of the real problems faced by working-class people, whether they are single mothers or not.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive: “Parasite,” “The Servant Economy,” “White Lotus,” “To Serve God and Wal-Mart,” “White Tiger,” “Covideo Nation,” “Caste – the Origins of our Discontents.”

The Kulture Kommissar / October 6, 2021