Author and TV show host Julia Child is an American culinary icon. Her kitchen, partly designed by her husband, Paul, is displayed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. In Australia, she’s probably best known as the co-author of the cookbook classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

In the early 1960s, when her cooking show, The French Chef, debuted on WGBH in Boston, she was a most unlikely TV star, as she would be today. She was more than six feet tall, generously proportioned and often made fun of her size 12 feet. Far from being a comely young woman, she was middle-aged and, in Julia (Binge, Foxtel), the eight-part series created by Daniel Goldfarb in which she’s delightfully portrayed by English actress Sarah Lancashire, experiencing the early, uncomfortable hot flushes of menopause.

Then there was that voice. Her transatlantic accent had hints of upper-middle-class-Massachusetts matron and fluctuated discordantly between high-pitched trilling and deep bass notes. There was no one like her, before or since, which is one of the reasons that this admiring, affectionate and beautifully rendered portrait is reflective of its times and relevant now.

Defying conventional wisdom and prevalent prejudices, Child charmed a receptive audience, first in the local TV market and then nationally when her show was syndicated. Her lack of polish and abundance of joie de vivre were essential ingredients of her appeal. Goofy and saucy, she was encouraging of effort and forgiving of mistakes as she introduced American households to omelettes, coq au vin and chocolate souffles.

The series identifies her as an improbable pioneer in the early days of television. It finds her back in the USA after years living abroad after Paul (David Hyde Pierce, forever memorable as Frasier’s Niles) reluctantly retires from his diplomatic career. With this loving couple at its heart, the series uses WGBH, the Boston TV station, as a microcosm as it depicts a period of seismic social change. The men who run it are sceptical and patronising about a cooking show: they see the public broadcaster’s territory as more highbrow.

But as we’re well aware today amid a smorgasbord of offerings, food shows can resonate strongly with viewers. The best ones offer the excitement of discovery and the promise of expanded horizons, ideally followed by a sense of achievement if a recipe is satisfyingly replicated. There’s good reason for the rise in popularity of baking during pandemic lockdowns: process and payoff can be comforting and rewarding.

Child was at the forefront of the emergence of how-to infotainment programs, a genre that’s become a TV staple. Yet she faced a phalanx of opposition. Reluctantly assigned to produce her show, Russell Morash (Fran Kranz) wants to be doing serious work, like making documentaries. Book publisher Blanche Knopf (Judith Light) is happy to enjoy the profits from Mastering the Art, but firmly believes that her most talented editor, Judith Jones (Fiona Glascott), should be focusing on real authors, such as Updike and Doctorow.

When Julia’s show becomes a sleeper hit, a French chef at a vaunted Manhattan restaurant accepts her compliments about his food, then informs her that the only true French chefs are men. A visit to the Childs’ home by Julia’s stern, disapproving father (James Cromwell) suggests that she flourished despite him while learning valuable lessons about resilience and persistence.