The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2024)

What do I know about this series going into it?

It’s about a Jewish woman in 1960s New York who becomes a stand-up comic in response to her husband cheating on her. I remember hearing mockery about how the writers screwed up in an early season 1 episode and had the main characters invite a rabbi over for dinner on Yom Kippur, when religious Jews don’t eat.

Recap

San Francisco, 1965. A coughing person, smoking, gets on a stage in what looks like a small bar. He’s talking about how he got arrested. He reads documents from his grand jury proceedings and the audience is groaning with boredom and impatience. Eventually he is identified as Lenny Bruce.1 Lenny asks the audience if they want to see his dance. They shout “no!” but he drunkenly does it anyway.

After the show, Lenny is sitting despondent on a couch. A blue-shirted woman who identifies herself as Midge Maisel’s manager – and Dick Gregory’s, Phyllis Diller’s, and Eartha Kitt’s – walks up to him. She tries to get him to go back to comedy, promising that she can change his being blacklisted. He walks away from her, and she’s furious and disappointed.

The manager walks outside and reports the failure to a smoking woman named Miriam.

Opening tag.

New York City, 1961. The manager, identified in captions as “Susie”, is asleep on a park bench. A pair of cops wake her up and tell her to move along. She fights them off and runs away but gets arrested. Miriam bails her out of jail.

Miriam and Susie go to an automat for coffee. Susie says she asked someone named Hedy (Lamarr?) to get Miriam “on the show”. Susie rants about someone coming back into her life who is now blonde. It seems Susie was in a lesbian relationship with a rich woman, who then got engaged to a man in Paris.2

In a New York City apartment, Tony Shalhoub and his wife Rose discuss how their kids, Ethan and Esther, fooled them into thinking they were too sick to go to school. As they’re debating who should be the one to punish them, Miriam walks in. Turns out they’re Miriam’s kids, not Tony and Rose’s. So who are Tony and Rose? Aha: they’re Miriam’s parents, watching the kids for her.

Miriam walks into the office she works at. She’s late.3 Miriam rants and raves for a while about how the men in the office don’t respect the fact that she has responsibilities outside the office and shouldn’t be calling her home every ten minutes if she has to leave to deal with an emergency (like fake-sick kids). But they weren’t the ones who called. It was a guy named Mike, who works for a guy named Gordon, who wants to see Midge right away.

Gordon mocks Midge for something I don’t entirely understand, then says Midge gets to be “on the show tonight”. Whatever Susie did with Hedy Lamarr must have worked – but Gordon clearly doesn’t want Midge on the show, and he’s pissed off at her (the feeling is mutual). He gestures angrily with a newspaper in hand, so I’m guessing Hedy must have said something in the press that left Gordon no choice but to allow Midge to perform. Midge gives the good news to Susie.

Elsewhere, two men West Wing Walk through a clothing factory. Man #1 tells Man #2 not to fall for his mother’s sob stories and buy the wrong clothes like he did “last time”. They meet the owners, Moishe and Shirley, who come out wearing canes and splints and telling a sob story of how they got injured. Man #1 and Man #2 assume this is a con, trying to get them to buy something they don’t need – but no, the story is true, and they’re retiring and selling the business.

Man #1 is called away to answer the phone – he’s Midge’s husband Joel, and she tells him she’ll be on the show that night. (Shirley takes advantage of the opportunity to talk to Man #2 about the uniforms he’s buying without Man #1 there to stop him from falling for it again.) Joel is 100% supportive, and tells her if she needs to trash him on national television to succeed, she should do so. During the phone call, Midge leans on the windowsill and gets pigeon sh*t on her sleeve, so a friend of hers volunteers to pick up replacement dresses.

Midge is in the makeup room, workshopping and filtering the jokes in her comedy routine with Susie and driving the makeup artist crazy with constantly rejecting her eyeliner proposals. The friend from earlier, Dinah, comes back with a dress from Bergdorf Goodman. She told the store the dress would be worn on the Gordon Ford Show that night, so they gave it to her for free as long as Midge gives the store a plug.

Midge calls her father to tell him to be in the audience for the show, and says she hasn’t been able to reach her mother; there’s been a busy signal at the house for the last four hours. I’ve got a very bad feeling about that.

Tony rushes home and finds Rose, who is busy putting together the seating arrangements for a wedding.

Rose is not supportive and refuses to come, since Miriam didn’t call her to invite her, and lists all the times Miriam lied to her. She refuses to admit that she was using the phone, but it turns out it had been accidentally left off the hook. Placing it back on the hook immediately results in four straight calls from various side characters, all reporting that Miriam is trying to reach her mother, which finally convinces Rose that Miriam really wants her to be there. Tony and Rose race out and fail to find a cab.

Astronaut Alan Shepard is the other guest on the show that night, and he’s in the green room with Miriam. Gordon comes in, says hi to him, and then gives Miriam the bad news: he’s not letting her perform her stand-up routine. Instead, he’s just going to interview her as one of the writers of the show. That way he fulfills whatever obligation he’s been forced into, but spitefully doesn’t have to give her the big break she is seeking. Miriam appeals to Susie, who appeals to Mike (the producer), who appeals to Gordon, but Gordon won’t be moved.

The show begins with a Carol Burnett musical number, Abe (I finally learn Tony’s character’s name) and Rose having arrived at the last minute.

There’s a commercial break and Miriam takes a seat on one of two stools for the interview, a sign that she’s a lesser guest than those who get to sit on the couch. When the show returns, Gordon barely introduces her (giving only her first name and referring to her as the show’s “lady writer”) and won’t let her get a word in edgewise. She eventually manages to slip in three quick jokes, so Gordon throws to commercial to prevent her from getting any attention – even though the producers protest there’s no commercial ready to broadcast.

Gordon wants to wrap up the show right after the commercial, but there are still four minutes of airtime. So Gordon has no choice but to interview Midge on the stools a bit more.

Midge is having none of that, though. She’s going to be reckless. She’s going to do her standup, Gordon or no Gordon. If she succeeds, it’ll make her career - but if she bombs, she and Susie will be ruined. Susie, you okay with it? She’s okay with it.

“I’m not a writer, I’m a comedienne,” she says in response to Gordon’s first question, then stands up and grabs the mike.

Midge tells her story: how her husband left her, she got drunk, and became a stand-up. (She’s not married to Joel, he’s her ex-husband.) She makes fun of Joel, of the woman he cheated with, and of her status as a single mother. She gives a heartfelt speech about what she wants in life, peppered with jokes, and ends by thanking Bergdorf Goodman for the dress. By the end her humor has even won over Gordon, who invites her to sit on the couch and introduces her properly, using the series title. He tells the audience that this definitely won’t be her last performance on the show – but whispers to Midge that she’s fired from her writing job.

Six months earlier. Miriam is at a Chinese restaurant getting advice on giving autographs from Lenny Bruce, who must have seen her perform (presumably at a smaller venue) and is certain she’s going to be famous.

Lenny pretends to read an extended fortune about her upcoming success from a fortune cookie fortune that actually only listed lucky numbers. Miriam must have kept it, because we saw her looking at it earlier in the episode.

2005. An elderly Miriam talks to her assistants about bookings and gets instructions from a man named Franklin on how to use a smartphone. She has an enormous house, and dozens of people working for her, and has even still kept the fortune cookie fortune all this time – but the soundtrack and the large empty rooms are showing us how lonely she is.

Old Miriam calls Old Susie, who’s on another continent, so they can press play simultaneously on their respective VCRs and watch Jeopardy! together over the phone. They talk to each other more than watch the show, as the camera pulls back and we fade out.

Unresolved questions

None. The episode was entirely - impressively - self-contained.

Ratings

These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.

The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

Story: 3/10. Looking back at the episode, very little actually happened. The plot was very simple: Miriam is offered her big break, it looks like it’s going to be taken away from her, then she grabs it anyway and succeeds.

There was a lot of filler, with some nonsense about a bucket stuck halfway between two buildings with a letter in it, that had nothing to do with the plot.

The closing scenes in 2005 were a bit mystifying. They contributed little to the story, unless their purpose was to entirely undermine Miriam’s success by demonstrating how much things are going to suck for her personal life despite her fame. I wonder if every episode of the series has ended with a flashforward to 2005 – and, if so, what the point of this one was in that context.

Writing: 7/10. I was generally happy with the quality of the writing. The show specialized in rapid-fire quipping, which I usually enjoy, though some parts worked better than others. The best and worst scenes, in fact, were in immediate juxtaposition: Rose getting all of the phone calls in a row was a masterpiece of comedic timing that a lot of other shows could learn from, but it was immediately undermined by her and Abe’s search for a taxi - a scene that went on for far too long and was accompanied by overly-jaunty music.

Midge’s actual standup routine at the episode’s climax was emotionally resonant but comedically weak; I didn’t laugh once. Which is odd, because I laughed plenty at the rest of the episode, which one would assume was written by the same people.

Production: 10/10. Despite the lack of plot and the presence of filler, the episode never felt like it was dragging along. The hour flew by so fast that only after writing the first six words of this sentence did I double-check and realize the runtime was an hour fifteen! That’s a massive credit to the direction, to the editing, and to the performances.

The world of 1960s New York was very well realized. And Miriam’s accent, intonations, and speech patterns are pitch-perfect, if one of my in-laws is any indication.

Characterization: 8/10. I very quickly got to know the five central characters in this particular story (Miriam, Susie, Gordon, Abe, and Rose). The other side characters – and in this I include Miriam’s ex-husband, who I bet is a main character in the series but certainly wasn’t one in this episode – were given very little to do. This was very much Miriam’s show.

Accessibility: 10/10. I had no trouble following the plot and characters. Only one thing confused me: some character named Plum who was assigned to be Miriam’s stage manager, and wasn’t the regular stage manager, and whom Miriam somehow recognized. I have no idea what that was about.

Closure: 10/10. So much so, in fact, that in many ways this episode felt like the second half of a standalone movie rather than the culmination of a five-season story. Mrs. Maisel wants to become a successful stand-up comedienne, and she becomes a successful stand-up comedienne. I didn’t get the feeling that any other plot or character threads existed, much less were being tied off or left dangling. There was only one subplot, Miriam’s relationship with her mother, and that too was neatly resolved.

Do I want to watch the series now?

It’s good but not great. Funny but not consistently so. It’s on my list, but not at the top.