Adapted from Stephanie Land’s memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive, Maid is a realistic and affecting tale of a young mother who tries to provide the best life for her daughter and break out of the cycle of abuse with her ex. Anchored by a star-making performance from Margaret Qualley, it is one of the best limited series to come out this year.
Alex (Margaret Qualley) picks up her daughter, Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) from her husband, Sean’s (Nick Robinson) trailer and drives off into the night. She has almost nowhere else to go, and ends up checking into a domestic violence shelter and then starts working at a cleaning agency called Value Maids for low hours and pitiful pay. She suffers setbacks and makes mistakes of her own, as she also deals with her mother, Paula (Andie MacDowell) and distant father, Hank (Billy Burke).
Maid strikes the balance between misery and optimism just right. Early in the series, Alex is dismayed when she learns about another DV survivor in the shelter, who she had struck a chord with and helped her out, had returned to her abusive partner. And then a series of events leads her down the same path, leading her to fall into depression, represented by her lying down curled up in a deep, black pit.
Most characters in the series are nuanced. Paula is clearly suffering from some undiagnosed disorder (the show suggests it is bipolar disorder), but she refuses to accept help and keeps getting into bad situations. Hank only empathizes with Sean’s struggles with alcoholism and doesn’t see how Sean is abusing his daughter. There’s Regina (Anika Noni Rose), one of Alex’s first clients, who initially appears dismissive and cold, but she and Alex eventually bond over their experiences and journeys through motherhood.
And then there’s Nate (Raymond Ablack), who plays the role of ‘the nice guy’ to perfection, down to his eventual jealous meltdown at finding out that Alex slept with Sean following a harrowing turn of events.
Sean backslides into drinking once Alex is back, and even brings another woman home to sleep with her. But then just a few episodes back, he was helping Alex with finding her mom and helping her get her house back.
Abusers are rarely cut-and-dry monsters with obvious anger issues.
Sometimes, they are sweet and considerate and they gaslight you into staying even as they control you financially and socially.
The series also addresses social perspectives on living off welfare benefits and how emotional abuse is often neglected because it is not as pronounced as physical abuse. Late in the series, Alex confronts Hank about a time when Sean pushed her against a wall and intimidated her in front of him, and he refuses to testify about it in court, saying it was just another rough patch situation that other couples go through.
The cast all play well off each other, particularly real-life mother and daughter MacDowell and Qualley.
Child actress Whittet also turns in a great performance, showing a gamut of expressions from joy to fear, which sometimes manifest in wordless reactions.
Maid takes many liberties with Land’s story, but she has said that is an accurate reflection of her journey. Thankfully, both her and Alex’s stories have happy endings.
