The celebrated British actress Sarah Lancashire follows in the footsteps of Dan Aykroyd and Meryl Streep in a biographical dramedy from HBO Max.

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Two actors have given substantial portrayals of Julia Child, each excellent in its own way: Dan Aykroyd, bleeding all over a defenseless chicken on “Saturday Night Live,” and Meryl Streep, swanning through the 2009 film “Julie & Julia.”

Beginning Thursday there are three, and the new one is the most substantial, at least in terms of screen time: Sarah Lancashire plays Child, the cookbook author, television pioneer and ebullient ambassador for French cooking, across eight episodes (more than six hours) of “Julia,” an intermittently charming biographical hodgepodge on HBO Max.

Lancashire, known for her sterling performance as a taciturn cop in the British crime drama “Happy Valley,” for which she won a BAFTA, might seem like an odd choice to play the larger-than-life gourmand. But from the opening moments, as Child prepares, serves and reigns over a dinner party where she announces the publication of her game-changing cookbook, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” Lancashire is at home in the role.

She telegraphs intelligence, capability and generosity of spirit with every glance and motion; the effusiveness with which other characters sing Child’s praises would be cloying if Lancashire didn’t make her so believably and unassumingly admirable. She is also a good physical match for Child, and the grace with which she carries her frame and the panache she brings to whacking recalcitrant saltshakers and caressing delicate souffles reinforces Child’s authority.

She’s not as giddily funny as Streep was; that has to do with Streep’s knack, when she chooses to exercise it, for warm, effortless humor. But it also has to do with the nature of “Julia,” which tries to be many things but doesn’t make much of an effort to be the charming romantic comedy that Streep’s sections of “Julie & Julia” were. (The Julie sections, about a blogger cooking her way through Child’s recipes, are best forgotten.)

Daniel Goldfarb, who created “Julia,” is a producer on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and one of the primary threads of the new series — which also happens to be its most entertaining aspect — is “Maisel”-like: a loving, knowing depiction of the early days of the public-television business, allied with a meticulous reproduction of early-1960s Boston and Cambridge, Mass.

We get to see Child and a small crew of family, friends and colleagues convince the Boston station WGBH to produce her landmark show, “The French Chef,” and it’s such a shoestring operation that everyone has to pitch in: Child’s adoring husband, Paul (David Hyde Pierce), wields cue cards while her devoted friend Avis DeVoto (Bebe Neuwirth) crouches behind the mock kitchen counter and covertly hands Child knives and whisks.

These scenes of production, endless argument and negotiation can be a lot of fun, especially when they include Robert Joy as the station’s general manager, a happy mix of preoccupied dreamer and slyly manipulative boss. Jefferson Mays also has some good moments as the archly pretentious host of a book-chat series who feels threatened — with good reason — by the unexpected success of Child’s cooking show.

Snobbery is a primary theme of “Julia,” as Child runs a gantlet of TV producers who sniff at the idea of devoting time and money to filming a woman in a kitchen. (There’s also a book editor, played by Judith Light, who abhors the idea of devoting time to TV.) It serves as a kind of binding agent for the multiple prejudices of the time. The producers are nearly all men, so their pretentiousness is entwined with their sexism; meanwhile, the one junior producer who sees Child’s potential is a Black woman who has to battle her colleagues’ genteel racism to get the show off the ground.

Like a lot of series these days, “Julia” has an abundance of plot lines that share space, and are nominally related, but that don’t really do much to illuminate one another and don’t work together to make the story more compelling or moving. Brittany Bradford, as the fictional Black producer, Alice Naman, is largely siloed in her own narrative about race, gender, career and potential spinsterhood that never gets past cliché. Alice’s boss, the initially hostile producer Russ Morash (Fran Kranz), suddenly expresses a desire to make civil-rights documentaries — this pulls in another obligatory topic from the period, but it, too, gets cursory treatment.

The desire to present a broad-brush canvas of the period — or to account for every issue that might get you in trouble if you neglected it — leads to some awkward scenes. A trip to a San Francisco drag cabaret with her good friend James Beard (Christian Clemenson, in a hearty, endearing performance) helps to reconcile Child to her growing fame, when she gets onstage and sings along with a drag performer whose persona, Coq au Vin, is based on Child. It all feels artificial, especially in a coda when the drag queen, now Ralphie, comes home to the apartment he shares with his mother and sighs, “Ma, I met her.”

Even less successful is a late scene in which Betty Friedan (Tracee Ann Chimo), whose “The Feminine Mystique” was published the same year that “The French Chef” went on the air, takes Child to task for harming the women’s movement (during a gala at which Child is the keynote speaker). It leads to a crisis of confidence for Child that bogs down the end of the season.

Scenes like that are indicative of what Lancashire is up against in “Julia,” which tries to have a “Mrs. Maisel” sprightliness while presenting Child’s emergence as a writer and performer as an endless series of obstacles, practical and psychological, to be overcome. An unfortunate adjunct to this is that the scenes of Child cooking on camera don’t get across the joy and loopiness of the actual program — it’s as if Lancashire, calibrating her performance to the more dour aspects of the script, won’t let herself cut loose.

If there is another season of “Julia” — the current one ends as Child is preparing for the second of the 10 seasons of “The French Chef” — let’s hope that Lancashire gets to play a less tortured Julia Child. As another public-television star tells Child at the end of that gala banquet, comforting her after Friedan’s dressing down, “I like you just the way you are.”