Netflix: “Maid,” starring Margaret Qualley and Andie MacDowell

How much do you spend on incidentals on a typical day? A Starbucks coffee

here, a quart of milk there. Isn’t it nice to know you have some “walking around” money or a credit card in case you run short?

Now imagine if you didn’t have that backup source —that you had to buy minutes for a crappy burner phone, or wind up in an apartment that had mold on the walls, or you had no credit cards at all? Whenever the smallest speed bump arises, you’re always on the brink of disaster.

That’s the plight that faces Alex (Margaret Qualley, star of the Netflix series “Maid.”) In addition to the problems mentioned above, she has a toddler (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) to support, an abusive alcoholic husband (Nick Robinson) to deal with and a crazy aging hippie mother (Andie MacDowell who is Qualley’s mother in real life) to supervise.

Faced with such prospects, most people would jump off a highway bridge. But not Alex. She decides to join a local maid service and scrub toilets for a living. Meanwhile, she moves out on Sean, rents a crappy apartment after a brief stay in a shelter, and dreams of attending college and becoming a writer.

Much of this show is painful to watch, for unlike anything you will read in the NYT, it points out the disparity between the haves and have-nots in a truly personal, un-preachy way. The have-nots include moms who can’t work because they have to watch their kids and can’t afford daycare. And victims of domestic violence who can’t leave their abusive husbands because they have no place to go.

What makes “Maid” worth watching is Qualley, who is superb as Alex. She is often able to convey a range of emotions by just staring blankly at the camera. The ensemble is also terrific, and it includes Regina, a well-to-do sympathetic lawyer (Annika Nona Rose); Nate (Raymond Ablack), a hunky ex-HS chum who wants to start a romance now that Sean is out of the picture; and Denise (BJ Harrison) as the head of the woman’s shelter.

As stated in the closing credits of the show, Maid is inspired by Stephanie Land’s book “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive”which is in turn based on the period in Land's life when she was a single mother working as a housecleaner to support herself and her young daughter. I’m told the TV show is fairly faithful to the book, so no matter which you tackle first, you’ll find the story sad. Or exhilarating. Or both, like I did.