The past two years have shown just how fragile life can be and how suddenly circumstances can shift. Perhaps that is why Netflix’s biggest successes of 2021 both centre on desperate people being driven to their limits. While Squid Game dominates the headlines, Maid, a quieter but equally devastating series, is building strong word-of-mouth attention. The show is on course to surpass The Queen’s Gambit as Netflix’s most-watched miniseries, with an estimated 67 million households expected to stream it within its first month on the platform.
Adapted from Stephanie Land’s bestselling 2019 memoir, the series follows Alex (Margaret Qualley), a young mother struggling to protect herself and her two-year-old daughter, Maddy, from a devastating cycle of domestic abuse. Homeless and on her own, Alex is thrown into a confusing and unforgiving bureaucratic system. She cannot receive subsidised childcare unless she has a job, yet she cannot find a job without childcare. She does not feel entitled to seek refuge in a shelter because her abuse was emotional rather than physical. She finds work as a cleaner, but can only work a restricted number of hours if she wants to remain eligible for government support. Alex has to decide which battles are worth fighting and save her limited energy for the things that matter most. More overwhelming than anything happening around her, however, is the enormous shame she carries.
The story sounds exhausting, and it is, but Maid tells it with such tenderness that viewers become deeply invested. Much of that emotional impact comes from Qualley’s remarkable and carefully layered performance as Alex, a woman who feels painfully real as she slips through the gaps in the system. The bond between Qualley and her on-screen daughter, played by Rylea Nevaeh Whittet, feels remarkably genuine, as does Alex’s relationship with her mother, Paula, portrayed by Qualley’s real-life mother, Andie MacDowell. Maid is concerned not only with Alex and Maddy, but also with the imperfect people who either soften or intensify Alex’s suffering. Paula is an unreliable, free-spirited artist who has her own history of escaping abuse and is described as having “undiagnosed bipolar disorder”. Meanwhile, Sean (Nick Robinson), the man Alex is desperately trying to escape, is an alcoholic who turns his own pain into a source of further harm for others.
Television has become increasingly familiar with representations of emotional abuse, from Dominic Savage’s I Am … series to Coronation Street, both of which have portrayed relationships involving coercive control. Maid explores the same territory, highlighting just how hard this form of abuse can be to prove. Later, Alex is presented with what initially seems like a guardian angel in the form of Nate, a Nice Guy who is eager to help her, at least until he no longer is. His apparent generosity comes with expectations of sexual entitlement, making his treatment of Alex almost as quietly threatening as the behaviour of her former partner.
Alex’s loneliness, combined with the complete lack of reliable support, feels especially powerful in a period shaped by pandemic-related isolation. In one episode, she quite literally disappears from view, slipping between the cushions of a sofa and imagining herself at the bottom of a dark well. The series repeatedly uses fantasy sequences to place viewers inside Alex’s experience. During an intimidating custody hearing, the legal language is transformed into the way it sounds to her: “She failed to legal legal, which is legally legal, per legal’. When she looks through paperwork, the documents seem to say things such as “Welfare Bitch”, “No-One Cares” and “Go Fuck Yourself”. Graphics on screen reveal the painfully small amount of money in her bank account. This immersive approach helps explain why Maid never turns into “poverty porn”: viewers are not merely watching Alex suffer at her lowest moments. Instead, they are brought into her world and allowed to experience it alongside her, while her dignity remains intact.
Qualley herself has acknowledged Alex’s privilege as an educated, attractive white woman, which is also one reason she ultimately has a possibility of escaping her circumstances. “It’s more challenging to ‘other’ Alex in this circumstance because of those reasons,” she told Elle magazine. “A lot of people in these exact same circumstances get stuck there.” Although Alex has better chances than many people in similar situations, Maid succeeds in making the specific story of this mother and daughter feel universal. Their everyday forest walks, during which they recite We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, become a recurring reminder of that bond.
Ultimately, the series asks us to consider what comes easily in life, and who has access to those advantages. It examines how displays of kindness can fail people who genuinely need assistance, and how quickly someone’s life can begin to fall apart when there is no one available to support them. There may be a small sign of hope waiting at the end of the journey, but Maid refuses to take shortcuts on the way there.
Maid is available on Netflix.