TikTok turned a nearly two-year-old Netflix show into a global hit again.
Netflix cranks out so much material on a weekly basis that it can sometimes feel barely possible to keep up with the endless new releases, let alone watch all the good stuff with the finite amount of free time you have. One result is that many fine movies and shows — like the limited series Maid, starring Margaret Qualley, which debuted to a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score in 2021 — come and go from the streamer pretty quickly. Today’s hits are tomorrow’s memories, and sometimes they disappear so comprehensively they barely even qualify as memories.
The 10-episode Maid, inspired by Stephanie Land’s New York Times bestselling memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, And A Mother’s Will To Survive, definitely seemed to fare better than many such titles when it first debuted. It was well-regarded and got a decent amount of attention. The series follows the story of “Alex,” played by Qualley. She’s “a single mother who turns to house-cleaning to — barely — make ends meet as she escapes an abusive relationship and overcomes homelessness to create a better life for her daughter, Maddy,” the official Netflix synopsis explains. This series, it continues, “is a raw and inspiring exploration of a mother’s resilience.” The source material is powerful enough that President Obama in 2019 even put it on the summer reading list he releases every year.
