As people like to say, “the book is better than the movie,” and that’s true for Maid, a series on Netflix based on a memoir by Stephanie Land.  At least, they are qualitatively different.  Furthermore, the Netflix series is billed as “inspired” by the memoir, so one has to manage expectations in terms of staying true to the book. 

At any rate, the memoir and the Netflix series seek to make different points.  The memoir is more concerned with the sociological complaints (not enough welfare), whereas the Netflix series also makes that point, but hones in on a feminist angle. And yes, the Netflix series is pretty woke. 

The Memoir vs. The Netflix Series: Protagonist 

The book, as one would expect, takes on more of a literary quality than the series.  Stephanie Land, obviously the protagonist of her own memoir, becomes Alex Russell, the protagonist in the Netflix series.  Alex is less plausible as a writer than the real Stephanie Land. Margaret Qualley draws attention to her own cuteness and charm, rather than cutting the appearance of a brooding, introspective writer.  Her open-mic reading does not exactly scream literary greatness–but so be it. The “voice” in the memoir is more introspective and thoughtful than the affable character Alex Russell.  

…the memoir portrays a protagonist somewhat darker, more depressed and unsure of herself.

To the extent that there is a social critique, both Maid and the Netflix series rely on having a sympathetic, and in the case of Netflix, attractive, protagonist.  She’s a hard worker who just wants the best for her kid.  How could anyone dream of denying her any social service?  Yet this is not necessarily the average American welfare recipient; rather she is a convenient one for the left-wing publishing industry to present.  You might say the fact that she’s young and white and female doesn’t hurt in terms of garnering the audience’s sympathy (not to suggest it should necessarily garner sympathy).  

Margaret Qualley’s Alex certainly sells the idea of a damsel in distress, though there are parts of the series that she randomly displays mechanical knowledge.  For example, she suddenly knows in detail the parts of a car engine.  The point is that Qualley is an attractive actress with a positive energy, whereas the memoir portrays a protagonist somewhat darker, more depressed and unsure of herself. But you’re not going to have that brooding energy as a woman when you’re Margaret Qualley.

The real life Stephanie Land, incidentally, mouths all the leftist tropes, such as denouncing her own White privilege, so it is no surprise that Land, according to NPR, approves of Netflix’s treatment of her book. 

Custody

In the Netflix film there is the notion that the courts are somehow unfair to Alex, given that she is in an unstable situation through no fault of her own.  The court is dubious as to whether she can really provide for Maddy.  Only after Sean relents does she get custody of her kid.  In the memoir, there’s literally no issue with custody–Stephanie gets custody right away with very little discussion.  It takes up maybe one paragraph, whereas in the Netflix series it is a drawn out legal battle, all to give the impression that the legal system is unfair to struggling single moms.  This would run 180 degrees contrary to all the complaints one hears from men online, which is that custody courts are actually biased against men.  I don’t know if that’s true, but at least the version portrayed in Netflix is 100 percent fictional in that regard.

Sean Boyd

In the memoir, in which Sean Boyd is Jamie, Jamie is described as having Jean Paul Sartre on his bookcase (the bookcase in his trailer, but nonetheless).  Sean is much more of a brute in the series.  Instead of punching a hole in the plexiglass of the door, as he did in the book, in the series it’s instead a hole in the wood paneling of the wall, so as to give more of a catalyst for Alex’s leaving. He is a drunk and a druggie.  In the memoir he’s more just a loser. 

So Sean’s “abuse” is more or less just that he’s a scumbag, but how can you make that abuse official?  This seems to be the central question of the Netflix series, whether emotional abuse is something that might make a woman technically a victim of “domestic abuse.” Stephanie/ Alex’s status as a purported victim of domestic abuse opens up additional welfare, housing, and scholarships. 

Furthermore, in the series, Alex gets back together with Sean so as to emphasize his patriarchal oppression of her.  For example, he is dead set against her going to college or even having her own transportation.  In the memoir, it’s clear that Jamie has moved on from the relationship with his baby mama as soon as they split up. 

Maddy

In the real-life memoir, Maddy (Mia) is merely seven months when Alex absconds from her house and life with Sean.  In the Netflix series, Maddy appears to be a two-year old angelic blonde girl, which is an understandable alteration, given that seven month-old babies are not going to provide a lot of action or drama for the camera, besides maybe crying and needing their diapers changed. Fair enough–a lot of the action is consolidated in the series, whereas the memoir takes the time span of several years, so by the time Stephanie moves to Montana, Mia (her real name) is a toddler. 

That Maddy is cast as an angelic blonde girl is not incidental: It’s to elicit our sympathy and adopt the belief that we need more generous welfare system, because after all poor Maddy is being made to inhale black mold in her own home (this was a real detail from the memoir, recurrent sinus infections due to a small, muggy apartment). 

Series Less Political (More Feminist) 

Stephanie Land’s memoir is trying to make a political statement about being poor in America.  The memoir is almost self-consciously similar to Barbara Ehrenrich’s Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenrich wrote the forward for Maid). Indeed, the tone of Maid owes a lot to that of Ehrenrich’s work, in terms of its ironic attitude towards a society that fails to meet their expectations in terms of providing a safety net, and the nitty gritty details of working a menial job, in this case, cleaning houses. The implication is that it should be easier to get more welfare, with less obstacles.

Maid certainly makes the case that working a minimum wage job with a kid is fairly unsustainable in America: 

“My job offered no sick pay, no vacation days, no foreseeable increase in wage, yet through it all, still I begged to work more. Wages lost from missed hours could rarely be made up, and if I missed too many, I risked being fired…We lived, we survived, in careful imbalance.” (142) 

One might be surprised to learn in the memoir, however, that Stephanie worked just 20 hours every two weeks: 

“...most of my paychecks had about twenty hours total for two weeks” (85).  

She later writes that she came to the decision to only clean one house per day, which took about two to three hours. 

All this drama about being a maid for what averages to two hours of work per weekday or ten hours per week? At any rate, Stephanie does offer some insights into her life as a maid as compared to the wealthy inhabitants of the houses she cleaned, noting that they tend to be chock full of sleep medication, depression medication, and other signs of a less than blissful existence, despite the accountraments of wealth. In these sections, there is a guilty voyeuristic pleasure in uncovering their lives.  That said, her observations on the mysterious lives of the people that hired her to clean their houses borders on invasive and unethical. After all, they did not ask to be included in her memoir, with her criticizing them for “pubic hairs and leg hair stubble” in their bathtub (I mean, that’s why they hired her).  

The Netflix series is more focused on the human drama and abandons this more ambitious societal critique.  Rather than making an economic appeal, Netflix’s Maid makes more of a feminist appeal, which relies on exaggerating the extent to which Sean abused Alex. As per the memoir, Sean/ Jamie is a complete dirtbag and a very wrong choice for a boyfriend let alone baby-daddy.  Yet his worst offense was punching a hole in a plexiglass door–not the wooden panel of a trailer house, as in the Netflix film.  Surely punching the wooden panel wall would hurt more.  In sum, Jamie yelled at her and once punched the door.   

Switching Characters’ Races 

I can’t help but notice that in the memoir, every character is white, whereas Netflix turned many characters in Maid into people of color, despite that there was no indication that this was their identity in the book. What would you call the opposite of “whitewashing”? 

In particular, everyone who does Alex a kindness is portrayed as a person of color, whereas the only white guy left is her scumbag ex, Sean, and her sad-sack father.  Some of these added diverse characters work fine, especially Danielle (Aimee Carrero), the Latina cohabitant of the domestic violence women’s shelter, whose plucky street-smart charm adds a lot to the episodes she appears in. But then, some of the characters, such as Regina, the wealthy African American corporate lawyer whose house Alex cleans, feel contrived. Such a person does not appear in Land’s memoir, nor does she really fit into the story.  

Another example is the couple from whom Stephanie rents a nice apartment at a discount in exchange for cleaning the family’s house. In the memoir, the couple is Alice and Kurt, a normal family with two children, described as maybe a little hippie.  In the Netflix series, the woke is ramped up as this family is transformed into a lesbian couple with no children. 

I would chalk up all these leftist interventions to Molly Smith Metzler, writer of the show.

Conclusion 

Maid the memoir is quite different than the Netflix series in that it focuses on the financial precarity aspect of Stephanie/Alex’s situation, whereas the Netflix drama focuses more on the human drama.  Maid the memoir is not especially literary, though it does at least call attention to one woman’s plight with her daughter, whether or not you agree with her particular prescriptions for her situation. In sum, Land’s Maid is merely from a leftist perspective; Netflix’s Maid is woke. 

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