Judith Jones Could Carry Julia's Feminist Themes to a Spin-Off

Max’s Julia Child biodrama is blessed with a deep bench of winning characters played by incredible actors. Aside from Julia (Sarah Lancashire) and her husband Paul (David Hyde-Pierce), there's Julia's best pal Avis (Bebe Neuwirth), the public-television producer who helped shepherd her show to the air (Brittany Bradford as Alice), her original French Chef director Russ (Fran Kranz), her new director Elaine (Rachel Bloom); the list goes on. But a special place at the table should be set for Julia's Judith Jones (Fiona Glascott), the book editor at the Knopf publishing house and the French Chef’s first great champion. She's a character so dynamic, self-possessed, and charismatic, that there seems only one thing left for her to do: leave Julia for a spin-off of her own.

It was Judith who saw Julia’s potential as a cookbook author, editing the seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking and setting her on the road to becoming a culinary legend. Judith's close friendship with Julia is captured in the TV series, oftentimes at great effort to the plot. The Childs reside in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the public television station from where they produce the show is in Boston. Judith, along with the rest of the American literary elite, is based in New York City, and her only role of consequence on The French Chef is "close personal friend of Julia Child." And yet there she is every week, hopping a train to Boston, lugging her manuscripts with her, getting an earful from her boss and mentor Blanche Knopf (Judith Light).

If this were a plot-driven show, Judith would be extraneous. Instead, she’s one of its very best characters. Her loyalty to and admiration for Julia is palpable, and Glascott is so skilled at showing how much that friendship means to Judith. Time and again she takes an active role in Julia's success and is eager to throw an elbow or two on Julia's behalf, though always with a smile.

As an editor, she has a talent for shepherding writers no less formidable than John Updike and Jean-Paul Sartre to help themselves dig out of whatever literary hole they've dug themselves into. That Julia creator Daniel Goldfarb and his team of writers have written multiple subplots where we just watch Judith in the act of being a book editor shows how much confidence they have in the character and in Glascott's performance. The woman makes book editing good television.

Judith is also an integral part of one of Julia's great themes, the "confederacy of women" Julia is building around her, professionally supporting each other and working to advance women in their own specific ways. But that can also be a reason why a Judith spin-off could be a great idea. The late Norman Lear was so talented at the art of the spin-off, able to turn All in the Family's success into shows like Maude and Good Times and The Jeffersons. Those spin-offs would take established characters and set them in their own shows, but thematically, they'd all revolve around Lear's progressive politics and affinity for putting social issues in his shows.

Julia depicts women who are finding their own particular paths to liberation in the changing social landscape of the 1960s, and the anxiety that comes with wondering whether you're doing enough or using your talents in the right way. In Season 1, Julia is thrown off after Betty Friedan lays into her about The French Chef being bad for feminism. Over the course of two seasons, Judith has been in a struggle with Blanche over whether she's letting her talent die on the vine by wasting time editing a cookbook. These storylines rhyme with each other, certainly, but on a logistical level, it only makes so much sense to have Judith constantly commuting from New York to Boston to participate in whatever Julia has going on that week. A spin-off for Judith set within the New York publishing world of the 1960s would be a thrilling way to extend Julia's themes and push them further.

Judith wouldn't have to be a complete stranger to Cambridge. She could still pop down for a couple episodes each season, or Julia could trek to New York now and then. Julia gets a lot of mileage out of Isabella Rossellini's Simca, and she's only in a handful of episodes per season.

In real life, Judith Jones climbed the ladder to senior editor and vice president at Knopf. Her work publishing books about cooking pushed beyond Julia Child and into American regional and also international cuisines. She continued to work with authors like Updike and Anne Tyler. There's a ton of story to be told there, outside of that public television studio in Boston. In terms that both Julia Child and Judith Jones might both appreciate, a Judith spin-off could allow Julia to double the yield on what's already a great recipe — and let a great supporting ingredient become its own signature dish.

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Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.