This new Netflix series that no one really expected is finally breaking audience records around the world and it's deserved because it is simply exceptional and overwhelming.<

Frankly, even for Netflix it must be a surprise. By producing the adaptation of Stéphanie's book Land Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive released in January 2019, the streaming platform did not think such success would be there. It's very simple, Maid, the name of the mini-series, beat the number of views of the Queen's Game that many thought untouchable: 67 million views in four weeks, against 62. Even though the story is quite depressing.

Maid tells the story of Alex, a young single mother forced to leave the family home because her husband, also young, is violent with her. Her daughter Maddy, barely three years old, under her arm, she goes to seek accommodation in a center for battered women. This is the beginning of a long struggle for the mother who will try at all costs to raise her daughter well even if it must require more than colossal efforts. Those who speak English will have understood that to earn money and meet the needs of his Maddy, Alex will do housework, “maid” meaning “housekeeper”. Except that to work, you have to have accommodation and be able to leave your daughter in a school during the day. And as to do that you have to work… the problem seems endless. Fortunately, Alex is always in an incredible good mood, she uses dark humor and keeps moving forward despite the obstacles. Among these, we can cite her mother, completely crazy and who helps her only when she wants to, her father who completely changed his life and zapped her, an in-laws in the west, a young alcoholic husband and an employee of the housekeeping agency not at all convenient. The picture is therefore not very pretty and we wonder how Alex will get out of it and if she will really get out of it.

After ten episodes, this Netflix mini-series, which means that it does not call for another season, Maid proves to be both exciting, poignant , overwhelming. The fact that it is her real life that the author of the book Stephanie Land (now 43 years old) tells adds a surplus of empathy and anger at the situation of this isolated mother. The resilience she demonstrates is remarkable and can very quickly turn into a source of inspiration. But for all this to work perfectly in the image and for the message to get across, the actress who plays Alex had to be sublime. She is. We are not talking here about a physical aspect but about the overall performance of a character that is hard, marked, alone.

At 27, Margaret Qualley signs a major performance. The one we discovered in 2016 in the film The Nice Guys alongside Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe and even more so in the series The Leftovers (2014-2017) and Fosse/Verdon in 2019 plays a very strong role there which propels to the top of the bill. She is no longer just the daughter of Andie McDowell - who incidentally plays her completely crazy and sassy mom in Maid - nor the muse of a major luxury brand (Chanel) to which she was the bride during the fall-winter 2021-2022 haute couture show. Margaret Qualley is now a recognized actress who manages here to alternate humor and despair as if nothing had happened and who will not run out of proposals in the weeks, months and years to come.

Unfortunately for those who liked Maid, there will most certainly be no season 2, even if the end of the book (which was by the way the favorite of a certain Barack Obama when it was released two years ago) is not exactly that of the mini-series and that anything is always possible. Like them, we would have liked to see the landscapes, sometimes magnificent, sometimes glaucous, of Maid, redo the ferry crossings with Alex, help her pick up the pieces with her mother, discover even more all these houses where she did these cleanings and which inspired his bestselling book. And therefore allowed Maid to become the most watched mini-series in Netflix history, quite simply.