Did you see Maid on Netflix? I thought it was one of the best limited series of 2021 and was appalled that the Emmys decided that somehow the superior Limited series on Neflix that year was the shallower Inventing Anna, a grudge I'm still harboring a year later.

Anyway, sometime in February of 2022 I was looking through a copy of the New York Times Magazine and I happened upon the Letters to the Editor section. I have no idea what caused the letter to be written but I remember very vividly one of tue quotes: The writer, a woman, said that she had seen Maid and had thought the series would have been more realistic if Stephanie, the central character - who to refresh your memory if you haven't seen it has just escaped an abusive relationship with her child's father, is living in poverty from paycheck to paycheck, has a father who is abusive and a mother who is bipolar and never takes her meds, who is treating with disdain by nearly everybody she meets if she is not ignored, whose only pure relationship is with her three year old - had resented her daughter.

My reaction to this is twofold. First, I wrote a long and very extensive article addressed entirely to this writer, and told her that she clearly had not seen ANY Peak TV show in the last twenty years. In other words, she clearly had not been getting Hollywood's mesage.

Second, this mindset speaks to something darker, both in the context of Hollywood's portrayals of mothers over the last twenty years and maybe why they're that way in the first place. Has our society reached a point where we now consider motherhood such a pointless and thankless job that the only mothers we believe are realistic are the ones who are unworthy of such gratitiude? Is Hollywood making this message common or is feeding a demand that some part of our society wants? The implications are troubling, to say the least. Has our society reached such a point that we truly think a compassionate, warm and loving mother is unrealistic? Perhaps that may be the answer that the final paragraph in your original article asked.