The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was always going to be my kind of show. A chatty, well-written dramedy about a woman trying to make it as a comedian in 1960s New York?
Sure thing.
I’m a dialogue guy and the dialogue on this show was otherworldy in a good way. It wasn’t realistic, it takes place in a fantasy world where most of the people involved have modern sensibilities. It took the origin of (I suspect) Joan Rivers and mixed it with a few real-world celebrities (most notably Lenny Bruce) and built a story about a young divorced woman who was trying to break into the big time.
It had a spectacular first season but delivered diminishing returns through its five-year run.
Before we get into how great the first season was let me tell you where I almost tapped out.
One of the things that kept continually happening on this show was that Midge would be presented with an opportunity that would make her famous and successful and she would almost immediately blow it up.
Usually by mentioning the one thing she should not mention, whatever it was, in her stand-up routine. The first go-around of this was with a character named Sophie Lennon, (the amazing Jane Lynch) who presented herself to her audience as a big, dumb, and poor New Yorker. A kind of mash-up of Henny Youngman and Minnie Pearl.
Lennon in real life is rich, poised, and cruel. And this dichotomy cannot stand. So Maisel slices and dices her in her stand-up and dooms her first real shot at a good career.
And that is not the point where I emotionally checked out of the series.
It was when Midge did it a second time. That happened in the third season with a character named Shy Baldwin, a black singer who is gay. This time, Midge is about to go on a world tour as his opening act and she, (either because she was incredibly stupid or because the writers needed it) makes a few minor jokes that hint at his sexuality.
At the end of season 3 Midge is quite literally left at the airport.
It was a moment where you could feel the heavy hand of the writer going, “Nah, we can’t actually do a world tour yet, we got too many other plans. There are characters back in New York who must be serviced, there isn’t enough budget for it, yadda yadda yadda.”
I feel this way anytime John Goodman gets killed on a television show I like.
Ahh, they wanted to lure me in with John Goodman but they didn’t want to keep paying that John Goodman money.
Ok, that may have only happened two times but you get my point.
Even if these decisions drove me batty, I kept up with the series. Stephanie Hsu was in this thing and she was fantastic. I got to see her light up a scene long before Everything Everywhere All At Once.
And then, because television can sometimes* turn the battleship around, season five was as good as, or better than the first season.
It had a couple of things working in its favor. First, everyone knew this was the final season so there was no reason to hold back. Second, the creators dispensed with the idea that Midge might not make it. The show now included flash-forwards and allowed us to see that Midge is, in the future, both rich and successful and had the kind of career she dreamed of.
At first, I thought this was the wrong call. As if I knew better than the brilliant Amy Sherman-Palladino. I do not. The flash-forwards, or future timeline, or whatever you want to call it made the show work in a whole new dimension giving it both the ability to tell more story and to make the moments in the present more dramatic (instead of the less drama I feared.)
The flash-forwards give us the arc of Midge’s career and the impact it had on her friends, family, and children. But we also get glimpses of her ex-husband’s future, her kids, and in one of the best episodes of the show, a roast (set in the future timeline) of Midge’s manager Susie Myerson.
The season also gave us several moments of real heartbreak. Midge’s daughter, grown up, brilliant and tortured, says that the only one who ever understood her was her grandfather but he’s gone now.
That grandfather, played by Tony Shalhoub, coming to the realization that his daughter, whom he mostly ignored because she wasn’t his son, was a brilliant person who had overcome an amount of adversity that would have crushed him. I can’t do it justice because I can’t remember exactly how it was phrased but it was a gut punch with Shaloub wringing every bit of emotion out of it.
There’s a bit with Susie where she has to confront the first great love of her life in order to get Midge a shot on a television show. Susie had fallen in love with a woman in college who went on to dump her and eventually marry Gordon Ford. Ford just happens to now have his own television show and Midge is working as the only woman in the writer’s room.
Sure, it’s convenient but it’s also good television.
Anyway, eventually, Susie does what she has to and then pours her heart out about her lost love to Midge.
And Midge, still oblivious to a lot of the world, asks Susie if she ever fell in love again.
Susie answers the question with a devastating look. This pair of fictional characters went through the best and worst years of their lives together. If you ever wonder why that is, you could see it right then, in Susie’s face.
The finale gives us one more stunning turn of Midge doing stand-up in a high pressure situation and killing it and then an epilogue that suggests the final years were both happy and sad, just as life is and will be for all of us.
* Two other last season turnarounds I can think of. The final season of The West Wing, which still suffered from serious problems but gave us two new politicians who reinvigorated the storylines and punctuated the show’s themes. And Angel Season 5. Angel was good to great for the first four seasons. Season 5 flips the premise of the show entirely and was the best season of any of the Whedonverse shows ever.
Dark Highways 
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