Would Maid have been a massive hit with a Black lead?

Slate

Netflix's Margaret Qualley-led limited series is on track to becoming the streamer's most-watched limited series, topping The Queen's Gambit. Maid made its debut this week at No. 3 on Nielsen's Streaming Top 10 with 1.47 billion viewing minutes. One of the reasons why Maid is so popular is it's "absolutely a show designed to get your tears flowing: It’s a sentimental-but-not-saccharine, depressing-but-not-hopeless watch," says Allegra Frank. "The trials and tribulations faced by single mom Alex, played by a magnetic Margaret Qualley, are both relatable and fully not—just intimate enough to touch the similarly skinny, white brunettes who are likely helping keep this show afloat. Because despite Maid tackling both the domestic service worker industry and the bureaucracy attached to poverty in this spiteful AF country with a surefire mix of pathos and patience, it also tells a particular version of that story: the white woman fairy tale version." As Frank notes, Maid tries to "subvert the racial elements regularly part of real-life versions of Alex’s story" by having mostly women of color help out Alex. "This dramatic inversion of racial privilege is not unique to Maid, but it’s both crucial to its success and also what’s unnerving about it," says Frank. "It feels as if the show is assuming that the person watching looks more like Alex than (Anika Noni Rose's) Regina, that it’s much easier to believe in a white woman becoming a success as long as the people of color have celebrated theirs off screen. It would be unpalatable, most likely, in its commonality, or assertion to Netflix’s majority white viewing base that this is how people of color live around this country too—that research shows more than 61 percent of domestic workers are nonwhite, despite making up less than 40 percent of the U.S. workforce, and more than half of Black and brown domestic workers live in poverty. Not that Netflix is afraid to showcase people of color who live harsh lives of all kinds. The platform is rife with content about life behind bars, or in poverty, or amid injustices. And, to be fair, there are also Netflix shows that celebrate diverse people’s diverse experiences. But, then, those are not the shows we are talking about as among the most-watched miniseries Netflix’s ever produced. (It’s telling that the show Maid has usurped at the top is The Queen’s Gambit.) A story like Alex’s is a white fairy tale that runs counter to plenty of data we have on how this story is usually far from white, and far from a fairy tale. But would Maid have been this successful if Alex were a Black woman? If nothing else had changed, but our lead was Black? Perhaps the majority of discussion then would be about the lack of realism—that it is harder to stomach a person of color persevering under systems made to ground her down than it is a model-thin white woman. Therein lies the challenge, I suppose: finding the middle ground between fidelity to the reality of being a lower-middle-class American of color and the predominantly white executives and creatives’ ability to tell those stories with the same empathy and hopefulness that Stephanie Land’s memoir received in its dramatic translation. Maybe it shouldn’t be as hard as it sounds. But maybe Maid and its core whiteness tells us otherwise."