How many ‘Julia’ projects on the menu?

Is “Julia” (9 p.m. Saturday, CNN) a documentary about Julia Child? Or a promotion for the HBO Max series “Julia”? And would it be so bad if it were a little bit of both?

Filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West were allowed access to the private diaries of future television chef Child and her husband, Paul, that offer insights into their life together during his career in foreign service and her work for the OSS during World War II. The OSS was America’s intelligence-gathering agency before the creation of the CIA in 1947. So, it can be said that the woman who introduced French culinary culture to America’s (public) TV audience was a bit of a spy — or at least spy-adjacent.

“Julia” also offers interviews with Child’s nieces and nephews as well as those inspired by her work as author and television host, including Ina Garten.

This documentary is a perfect companion piece to the dramedy “Julia,” streaming on HBO Max, starring Sara Lancashire, David Hyde Pierce and Bebe Neuwirth. That smart, funny series concentrates on Child’s (Lancashire) work as a television pioneer, inventing the TV cooking show on the fly as she navigates childless middle age with an indomitable spirit laced with a certain stoic melancholy. James Cromwell has a brief but memorable role as her affluent and condescending father. Child’s posh California upbringing is documented in greater detail in CNN’s documentary.

While these competing or overlapping “Julia” projects should bring delight to fans of “The French Chef,” they raise questions about the relationship between CNN and HBO Max. Is this the case of one corporate entity hyping another?

Just a few months back, CNN+ was supposed to be its own stand-alone streaming entity. It was promoted at great expense and then jettisoned at the very moment that the WarnerMedia/Discovery merger was consummated. Will CNN be folded into an HBO Max/Discovery streaming service? It would make sense to add a news service brimming with scripted and reality fare. It would also be a sign that some streamers, HBO Max and Netflix among the most obvious, have become large enough to offer their own stand-alone universe. They have not so much replaced cable as become a new, but not very different, version of cable.

In all fairness, CNN’s weekend documentaries are not just cross-promoting HBO Max series. “Watergate: Blueprint For a Scandal” (9 p.m. Sunday) dovetails nicely with the fun and ambitious miniseries “Gaslit” (8 p.m. Sunday, Starz, TV-MA), starring Julia Roberts and Sean Penn as Washington’s squabbling power couple, attorney general John Mitchell and his entertainingly quotable wife, Martha.

In “Blueprint,” White House counsel John Dean recalls the paranoid mindset that resulted in the burglary of the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate hotel some 50 June 17ths ago.

Dean is one of the few major players from the Watergate scandal still around to tell his side of the story. After serving time in federal prison for his role in the coverup and scandal, Dean has become a vocal critic of subsequent administrations.

In “Gaslit,” he is portrayed by Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey”) as a feckless careerist whose actions seem motivated as much by self-promotion and self-preservation as by virtue. “Gaslit” also accentuates the role of his attractive wife, Mo (Betty Gilpin, “GLOW”). Contemporary journalism and popular history had pretty much reduced her to a silent partner. But “Gaslit” sees her as the brains, or at least the backbone, of the outfit.