The series revolves around the lives of Julia Baker (Diahann Carroll), a widowed Black nurse, and her young son, Corey (Marc Copage). Julia's husband has been killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam, and the series begins with the now fatherless Baker family moving into an integrated apartment building in Los Angeles while Julia secures employment at the medical offices of Astrospace Industries. She works with a gruff but lovable elderly white physician, Dr. Chegley (Lloyd Nolan), and a homely but spirited white nurse, Hannah Yarby (Lurene Tuttle). Julia's closest friends are her white neighbors, the Waggedoms-Marie, a scatterbrained housewife; Len, a police officer; and Earl J. Waggedom, their son and Corey's pal. While Julia lives in an almost exclusively white environment, she manages to find a series of impeccably refined African-American boyfriends. Paul Winfield played one of her more long-standing romantic partners. Performed with elegance and dignity by Carroll, Julia represented a completely assimilated-and thoroughly nonstereotyped-African-American image to prime­ time viewers.
     Julia's unthreatening respectability served as the basis for a great deal of heated debate during the series' initial run. In the midst of growing political militancy among many African Americans, some critics accused the show for presenting Julia as a “white Negro.” Nothing in the Bakers' lives indicated that they were in any way connected to the rich tradition of Black culture and history. Neither Julia nor Corey was ever the victim of racism. However, Hal Kanter emphasized that the show did attempt to stress the more "humorous aspects" of prejudice and discrimination, while focusing on how the Black characters attempted "to enjoy the American dream." Humorous situations dealing with race tended to work to defuse anxieties about racial difference. For instance, in her initial telephone interview with Dr. Chegley in the series' pilot, Julia mentions that she is Black. Chegley deadpans: "Have you always been Black-or are you just being fashionable?" When little Earl J. Waggedom sees Corey's mother for the first time, he points out, "Hey, your mother's colored." Corey replies, matter-of-factly, "Yeah, so am I." To which Earl responds: "You are?!" 

     The show was also criticized for presenting no male head of the family. While the Bakers were emphatically middle-class, living in a beautifully appointed apartment rather lavish for a nurse's salary, the fact that an unattached Black mother ran the family appeared to perpetuate stereotypes about a "Black matriarchy" in which Black men had no place. A recurring problem in the Baker household was who would care for Core , while Julia was at work. Several episodes deal with Julia's dilemma in securing a mother's helper. Unwittingly and quite unself-reflexively, the show was echoing a painful aspect of the history of Black women, many of whom had to leave their children unattended while they went off to care for white children and work as domestics in white establishments.

     While these depictions of race relations generated objections, they also elicited praise from critics and viewers. Ebony, a mass-circulation magazine targeted at a middle-class Black readership, lauded the series for giving viewers an alternative to the steady diet of ghetto riot images of Blacks so pervasive on news programming. The show was also commended for representing Black characters who were not thoroughly and exclusively defined by race.

     Julia was an important moment in American broadcasting history as television programmers struggled to find a way to introduce African Americans into entertainment formats without relying on objectionable old stereotypes, but also without creating images that might challenge or discomfort white audiences.