Julia Season 2

This lady was deeply homophobic and the rewriting of history to make her some kind of lovable feminist bon vivant makes me sick.

R1 Her homophobia seems much more complicated than the simple tribalism it usually stems from today. And it is fascinating to see how it was tempered by admiration and appreciation of the gay people she actually knew and worked with.

The first episode was a bit "Previously on" but the best thing about it was, hands down, Bebe Neuwirth.

Judith Light is serving HAM! HAM! HAM!

And Russ the hot Don Draper wannabe was still hotly hot in this episode.

I really enjoyed the forst three episodes that dropped, interesting in ways I was not expecting.

Isabella Rossellini was unrecognizable for a moment and very good. Stockard Channing looks ghastly, like Madame in the old Waylon Flowers and Madame ventriloquist act. Danny Burstein looks bigger and taller than I was expecting, or maybe Bebe Neuwirth is just tiny.

I liked if for a while, then her voice became tiresome.

Too much Earl J. Waggedorn for me.

Stockard looks OK for 79. Her work settled a bit. Her little speech reminded me a bit of her monologue from Six Degrees. Well, when one has Stockard one gives her a monologue.

Sam was quite the dish. I didn't buy the Jacques Brel thing for a second, though.

I'm sick of almost everyone at WGBH. I want to see Julia and Avis.

R7, I agree about the tv station employees. They’re generally so pedestrian and uninteresting (although I admit that Rachel Bloom was a good addition).

Is Sarah…larger..this season?

R8 I like Fran whatshis face aka Russ but honestly I couldn't tell any of the others apart.

The writing on this season is DREADFUL.

Was it this bad last year & I just didn’t notice?

I like this season almost better because it covers less familiar territory.

Helen Gurly Brown shitting on the milquetoast, male supremacist host on air was funny.

Episode 3 was good, although it beggars belief that both Brel and Sartre would be crossing paths with these people.

I knew how Alice's story would end in this ep from the word go, though.

I thought Sartre didn't speak English. In e3 he's being a drip in English.

That Paul was such a homo.

Every time I see this thread title I think:

this show is boring as fuck

Fat and not shaped like Child at all.

I feel like the series just doesn't know what it wants to be or what it wants to say. It began so well its first season but I saw the seams showing before they were done. Episode 1 did not impress me. But I'll keep watching, of course. as I do love the cast.

Julia has been a background character in her own show this season. Judith and Avis are the most interesting things about the show right now

I, for one, am not very enthusiastic about the character of Judith and don't know why she's practically railroaded (is that the right phrase?) the series. Why should we care about her? But also, what are the JULIA writers even trying to say about the character? She seems to have "issues" but I don't why or what they ar

And Alice - instead of maturing with her new power at WGBH, she seems to have become a dithering idiot who can't deal with the station's programming and can't even tell if she's pregnant or not....or what to do about it. She's become spunkless.

Is Alice's boy friend the same fellow from last season? Either way, I hope he gets a shirtless scene soon to relieve the boredom.

Now that I know Julia Childs was a "rabidly" homophobic cunt - she's dead to me. Don't want to hear another thing about her.

I kind of liked the idea of that Stockard Channing character as a sort of Truth Teller confronting all of these strangers en masse and individually with her opinions about them. But her dialogue and delivery was clunky.

Why in the world would young Sam go after old Paul? Were there really no better options in Provence?

Was Sam in bed with a woman in that end montage?

It seems that Sam was a starfucker/gold digger (obviously) and he must have thought Paul had some kind of cred in the art world.

Beautiful man, though.

[quote] And Alice - instead of maturing with her new power at WGBH, she seems to have become a dithering idiot who can't deal with the station's programming and can't even tell if she's pregnant or not....or what to do about it. She's become spunkless.

That did seem out of character for her, but I also saw that as a remark on the times, that even a smart, educated woman might not know a lot about her own body and/or human sexuality, as per the moral code of the times.

I am so excited! I loved the first season and will definitely be my Thanksgiving watch tomorrow. Though, I feel Sarah Lancashire makes Julia more flowery and soft where she was a much harder, butchier woman in real life. I don’t think she leaned as heavily on Paul. And the HBO series is filled with make believe. The real Russ Morash, producer of “French Chef” put out this interview explaining the many fabrications the show made up:

Well, kind of a weird episode.

I thought being back in Boston might give the episode a little more momentum. But still, wtf is this about? All the "plot lines" just seem to meander around without much tension. Julia herself even seems unmoored and purposeless.

Poor Sarah Lancashire....please find yourself a better character back in the UK. The writing this season has left her rather uninteresting.

Interesting episode.

DHP in a dual role.....hmm.

Bebe owned tonight's episode. She did it all. Or as the kids would say: She ATE and LEFT NO CRUMBS!

R21, I think the idiom you are looking for is “hijacked.” But I like the character (and actress) so I don’t mind. And Bebe really was brilliant.

I’m hoping Paul’s homo dalliances come into play with the FBI guy.

I continue to be confused and disappointed with this series in its latest installment. So many story lines that seemed to come out of nowhere and go nowhere -

Paul's twin brother, wtf?

a LIFE Magazine writer who seemed to want to do a hatchet job on poor Julia (are the writers familiar with LIFE?

That LIFE would want to rearrange all the furniture in Julia's house for a photo spread

That women's issues show with the Black hostess, wtf?? And wouldn't they have previewed the pilot with some kind of an audience before axing it?

The uselessness of the Rachel Bloom character

Julia's dependence on Avis for a magazine interview (especially with Judith already there)

Enough with Judith already. Why must she be constantly hanging around?

And worst of all, Sarah Lancashire is really becoming tiresome because of the bad writing

[quote] this show is boring as fuck

It’s not supposed to be Mannix, Rose.

I've enjoyed S2 well enough but agree that Julia seems to be weirdly backburnered this year.

And having her away from the WGBH people for the first few episodes was just Soap Writing Mistake #1 - don't island your main character(s). One episode, sure. Three? Give me a break.

I thought this latest episode was bizarre. A twin brother? Why? The black female producer has been anachronistic from the start, but that chat show would NEVER have gotten that far in 1962 and certainly would not have had a moderator of color.

They seem at pains to show Julia as flawed and rather conservative, which is fine and perhaps true, but a sort of aimlessness seems to have set in with this series and I’m not sure why so many of the supporting cast have come to the fore this season. I’m just not that interested in most of them. And why should we care about the office politics at Knopf publishers in the early ‘60s? Oh, yeah, I know, sexism.

But enough already.

Bebe and DHP really made a meal of the last show, but again, why is Julia a supporting character in a show named after her?

Season 2 is trying too hard to be... woke? .... Julia was moderately homophobic until she saw what the AIDS crisis was doing to the population, then she changed her tune considerably. She was never a feminist. I liked Julia Child a lot for who she was, and this "reading between the lines" alternate history is as bad as Bridgerton being what it is complete with powered fountains early in the 19th century

When did Alice’s boobs explode? I don’t remember noticing them at all last season, but now they’re sailing into scenes at least a yard before her.

Somebody at HBO needs to pull the plug on this thing.

They probably will, R40. WBD/HBO is killing most of their shows.

That might have been the best ep of the season. It was funny and moved quickly. Lots of snappy dialogue.

"Tell my mother I'm dead."

I think it’s the best episode of the series so far, R42.

I almost fell asleep during this episode. Those tedious unfunny telethon scenes dragged.

I do love the hunky cameraman who was forced to man the phones, though.

Why do they keep dragging that book editor Judith back for every episode? It's not that the actress is bad, but the character just doesn't need to always be hanging around. Avis filled in just fine previously.

The beefy camerman was hot, indeed.

As is the actor who plays John Updike.