MAID--something of a review

Trust me on this: if you're going to watch Netflix's hot new series, MAID, don't, like us, watch at the same time you're reading the book of Job. The combination could be lethal.

Especially in the opening scenes of the series, it's almost impossible to wonder what more could go wrong in the life of Alex, played powerfully by Margaret Qualley. When who and what and why slowly become untangled, we discover a young mom totally--totally--beset with horrors. She determines to leave a go-nowhere relationship with a bartender named Sean, who has fathered her precious child but has surrounded her with an echo chamber of fear and ugliness. They live in a long, narrow trailer house where some cheap picture is purposely hung over a hole in the paneling created by the man she once loved when, in rage fueled by drink, he punched it with his fist.

What she fears is not just him--she fears him also, and with good reason--but the prison she finds herself in, a life that is stalled on "Go" and promises, well, nothing but more of the same.

So, she bolts. Unlike Job, she doesn't decry her horrors or create elaborate theological reasons to try to explain and understand why she is so critically unloved, she simply leaves with nowhere to go. Nowhere. She has no car, no money, no parents, no friends, no job, no education, no skills, and now, as the show begins, no home.

But she has her child, Mattie, who, at three, deserves an Emmy. Alex may not be Madonna--although one could make a case for it--but Mattie certainly is the "child." We're told at one point that she raised cain with her father, but we never see even a dirty diaper. Like the Babe in a Manger, no crying she made. Really?

Mattie compounds Alex's problems, of course. Nothing in her freight train of misfortunes is as central to the elements of her being able to live alone--getting a job to get money to buy gas, to get away from Sean to get a place to live--has a different focus: to get day-care. Mattie needs day-care. That's where the search has to begin. Of course, day-care costs money. It's just one dang thing after another.

Paula, her mother (Andi McDowell) is and has been, throughout Alex's life, a basket case. An unregenerate late 60s hippie, she's lived a life totally out of control, so far off the rails that her daughter has had to babysit her and continues to, even though Alex has more than enough horrors of her own to face down. Paula fashions herself an "arteest" of inestimable worth, but she's never been anything more than a horrifying New Age pain in the ass.

The men live lives of quiet desperation, trying to make it from one AA meeting to the next, and, occasionally, failing. Mattie's father is a carbon copy of Alex's father--the parallels, at times, become almost melodramatic. Let's give the men this much: occasionally they try to be better than they are. Sometimes they even have their moments. But mostly they're pretty much despicable.

With the possible exception of Nate, an engineer with what seems a heart of gold. But he doesn't want to help Alex as much as he wants to date her--I think that's what we're supposed to feel and dislike--and therefore, with Alex already suffering from PTSD, he's just another "user," which is to say "loser." Men don't fare well in this story.

There's something about MAID that left me unsettled, but that's attributable, I think, to the genre. Memoirs that seek to clear the air of familial stench can't help but create in me a desire to visit the story from another angle. Alex and Mattie are not Madonna and child, and sometimes her almost suicidal quest for independence and freedom gets pushed a bit by the script.

At one of several really low points throughout the series, Alex is offered a place with a rich client (Alex is the maid in MAID). At that point, she has a choice, really: she could take up the offer and lose her independence, or turn it down and almost inevitably put her daughter in a much, much worse position. She chooses her independence. Prudence, it seems, argues differently here, but politics wins the contest. 

MAID is a raw, clear-eyed look at the white working class, at women of the white working class in our culture and nation. It hurts, like the book of Job hurts. 

Job is, stem to stern, horrific theological wrestling with the very idea of God. Sadly enough, in MAID, He is not a presence. Alex's horrors are immense and they stop only when Alex sees her way clear to leave for a college, where she'll learn to become a writer and tell this particular story, or at least, the story that created a scenario for the scriptwriter who did this one. She will, finally, get her independence.

If I've come off a little negative here, don't not see MAID. It's raw and intense and, for this viewer at least, a glimpse into the lives of people I don't know and rarely even see.

An old friend once worked in human relations at a local factory who, like others around here, had trouble hiring workers. "Schaap," he told me, "I work with people every day you don't even think about."

Watch MAID. It's television at its best--and most difficult.