For the past four seasons of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, we’ve watched stand-up comedian Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) struggle to find success in the man, man, man’s world of late ’50s/early ’60s comedy. Even possessed with unflappable energy, rapier wit, and a fabulous wardrobe, Midge still finds herself self-sabotaging at exactly the wrong times.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in Season Three, when she was kicked off Shy Baldwin’s tour for hinting at his homosexuality. The next season found Midge trying to secure headlining gigs but forced to emcee at a strip club, until fellow comedian and friend Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby) helped her evade a police raid and urged her to restart her stand-up career.
Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino (of Gilmore Girls fame), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel kicks off its fifth season by sending us to the future, one in which Midge has found worldwide fame, but without longtime agent Susie Myerson (series standout Alex Borstein). How this impasse comes to, uh, pass is the subplot that looms over the show’s last eight episodes.
But it’s far from the main one, as it relies on those 5-10 minute sequences at the beginning of each episode to tell the bulk of the story. Mostly, we follow Midge’s attempts to land a guest spot on the Gordon Ford Show, and later to stand out as a writer on same. Ford (Reid Scott) is another in the show’s long lines of handsome dudes who find Midge fascinating — at first — and then, when he can’t charm her, infuriating.
Brosnahan, who won an Emmy for her role in 2018, is still exceptional as the woman who refuses to be pigeonholed at the expense of success. If some of her victories seem improbably in JFK-era American, that’s a huge part of the show’s appeal, as is the lush production design, vibrant costumes and rat-a-tat dialogue. Yes, there’s an element of Elseworlds fantasy to it all, but as we know from Gilmore Girls, people don’t really talk how Sherman-Palladino writes them.
Which is why watching Midge repeat her past mistakes yet again is so frustrating, especially when they come at the expense of established characters like Joel’s new love interest Mei (Stephanie Hsu), who literally embodies the “you can’t have it all” pre-feminist mindset, and Kirby’s Lenny Bruce.
Midge butting heads with Gordon Ford’s stable of writers is an interesting new wrinkle, but do we really need *another* season of mom Rose (Marin Hinkle) waging war with her matchmaker rivals? Or a multi-episode arc about Susie’s dippy magician client Alfie (Gideon Glick)?
At least Brosnahan reliably impresses in both the “present” and the time jumps, while Borstein still carries every scene she’s in. The relationship between Midge and Susie’s remains the glue that holds the show together, even as both women’s flaws threaten to undo it.
Michael Zegen’s Joel Maisel remains an unlikely sympathetic character, while Tony Shalhoub, as Midge’s father Abe, continues one of the series’s best character arcs.
To that end, there’s a scene in the penultimate episode when Abe talks about taking Midge’ brother Noah (secret CIA agent Will Brill) to the museum as a child, engaging him in these intellectual pursuits, and belatedly realizing he never did the same with Midge. Seeing her daughter venturing down the path he tried to charter for his son makes him wonder what might have been.
The monologue is a sobering reminder of how much has been lost by centuries of marginalizing and stifling the voices of women and POC. What advances in science, medicine, technology, and the arts have we been denied? Where would we be if not for the gatekeepers of who is “allowed” to be scholarly and contribute? It’s one of the few times Shalhoub is allowed to portray Abe’s inherent insecurity straight.
It’s perhaps the show’s most overt acknowledgement of the one of its larger themes. Kudos to Sherman-Palladino and company not only for condensing that rapid fire Gilmore Girls patter into something less self-indulgent, but also highlighting an issue that is rarely addressed.
The final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel recognizes its own finality. We’re saying goodbye to characters who may have gotten what they wanted, but at a steep cost (and that’s not counting the ones in prison).
The first three episodes of the fifth and final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are now streaming on Prime Video.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
