I have such mixed feelings on this show. It's a lovely show, I like watching it very much. I love the characters, their relationships, the acting, the bits of Niles and Lilith. The story is warm and funny. I really enjoy it as a heart warming piece of entertainment.
However, this show is about real people in a real time and the liberties it's taking with the history are, tbh, utterly offensive. First is the obvious character of Alice. Alice is based on producer Ruth Lockwood, who is white. Alice is a good, well acted character, I like her. But rewriting history to include a character who couldn't have existed as she was gives such a false impression of the time and makes me question everything. If the producers wanted a diverse cast, then the work should have been done to create a character who would have been true to the time period, rather than just making a white woman black in 1960 in the US and pretending that there is no difference.
As for now questioning everything in the show, well tbh, that's fair as almost every single episode has glaring cases of modern writing being shoved into the period. The idea that Julia had a sexual exploration with a woman in college. The idea that Julia would have been just thrilled to meet a drag queen version of herself in the Mission. The idea that James Beard would have brought her there in the first place. Julia's own writing in this period show her as really quite homophobic. She was friends with James Beard, but that was very, very much in spite of his homosexuality. She absolutely wouldn't have celebrated that with him in the early 60s. Julia's attitude changed completely in the 80s but even then she admitted to her past homophobia.
Pretty much everything with Judith Jones is off. Apart from the fact that she was an editor and enjoyed Julia's company very much. The entire depiction of her career and her interactions with absolutely everyone else are completely wrong. Her interactions with Blanch Knopf are utterly off. The way she spoke to James Beard. But most of all. Jones was married with two young children in this period. She has spoken since about how she felt pulled in every direction. Constantly exhausted by working at the type of career she had chosen and the time struggle to be the best mother and editor she could be. And how she felt these were the choices she made so they were her priority rather than her own wants.
So I like the show but would enjoy it immensely more if it were about fictional characters. And more effort had been put into creating a character of Alice that better reflected the time period. Because having such completely anachronistic events and characterisations episode after episode makes a mockery of the growth that all of these people really did undergo as a response to society around them changing. Julia's unthinking homophobia in the 60s to her turn around to being a staunch ally during the AIDS crisis in the 80s, at a time where gay men in particular, were being horribly stigmatised, is such a huge part of who that woman was. Pretending that was just always there, because she was a bit bi herself, detracts from and undermines her journey. And belittles the stigma that so many people suffered in that time period.