I am going to be so honest with you. I am really going to miss The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It seems like just yesterday that I was watching Midge perform her first show at The Gaslight. But alas, all of the incredible cast is moving on to other projects and commitments, so long story short, the show has had a really great run and I’m so glad they got to have this show. So to get you caught up if you haven’t watched the show yet, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a show on Amazon Prime that takes place in the 1950s, and it’s about a middle-class Jewish woman named Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) living in New York City with her parents, Abe and Rose (Tony Shaloub and Marian Hinkle), and her husband, Joel (Michael Zegen) and their two kids, Ethan and Esther. Joel is an aspiring comedian but his jokes aren’t all that good and he copies them from the other male comics. Midge comes by to show him support and drop off a brisket she made. The owner of The Gaslight, Susie Meyerson (Alex Borstein), doesn’t care about Midge’s enthusiasm and tries to shrug her off. Then the night of Yom Kippur, Joel packs up and announces to Midge that he is leaving her because he is having an affair with his secretary, Penny Pan. She drinks an entire bottle of wine, and goes over to The Gaslight and does an unprompted standup routine where she talks about how her husband cheated on her with his secretary. Susie takes quick notice and is impressed by Midge’s snappy wit and fierce jokes, and the audience is also impressed by this newcomer, so Susie decides to become Midge’s manager. At first entering the business is challenging because Midge’s jokes sometimes get laughs and other times not so much, and Midge has such high expectations but also there are times when she loses her self-confidence. Meanwhile she has to keep her comedy career (and her new day job at B. Altman) a secret from her parents, especially because this was a time when there was a lot of sexism and female comics were often not seen as funny. But she learns about resilience and how to bounce back from rejection, failure and all other kinds of challenges, and she ends up having a successful career even with all its ups and downs. And her and Susie weather those ups and downs together.
In season 5, the Sherman-Palladinos wrap everything up and we see Midge’s career in retrospect. In episode one of the season, Esther Maisel in sitting in a therapist’s office in the 1980s talking about the challenging relationship she had growing up with her mother, Midge. Then Shirley and Moishe have dinner with Joel, Midge, and Midge’s parents and they share big news. Shirley and Moishe announce they are getting a divorce, and this causes friction throughout the dinner. When Joel tries to intervene, Moishe verbally hits back at him by telling him to share some of his own news. Joel reveals that he and Mei (Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Stephanie Hsu) are going to get married and that Mei is pregnant. In an earlier season, Joel goes to a gambling parlor run by a family of Chinese immigrants to start his own comedy club and he meets the family’s daughter, Mei. They fall in love and become a couple, and Mei ends up pregnant with Joel’s baby. There is friction and I thought they were going to have the baby, but then Mei shows up at Joel’s apartment and tells him she got an abortion and is moving to Chicago to become a doctor, which was one of her dreams. He tries to talk her out of it, but she leaves and tells him she can’t have it all (i.e. be a mother and follow her career as a doctor.) He falls into a depression and one night at the club he drinks himself silly and his friend, Archie, tries to get him to calm down but Joel launches into a drunken tirade and hits on women at the club. He goes down to the gambling parlor downstairs and confronts Mei’s father about Mei leaving him, and the father gets some guys to beat up on Joel for disrespecting him. Joel is left curled up in fetal position with severe bruises. Meanwhile, Susie is doing all she can to get Midge connected to Gordon Ford (played by Reid Scott.) Early in the episode she wakes up sick because she was in a snowstorm and saw a bulletin board for The Gordon Ford Show. But Mike Carr, Gordon’s talent booker, hates Susie, especially because she persuaded his kids to watch a violent film called Spartacus and she insults his Christmas tree, so he refuses to book Midge for a job on the show. Midge performs standup at the strip club where she worked as a comic in season 4 and Susie sees Gordon Ford and tries to get Midge a job with him. Gordon meets her and invited her to work on his writing team, but Midge hesitates and tells Susie that she is a comedian, not a writer, but Susie tells her this opportunity will lead to better opportunities, so Midge accepts the offer. Episode 2 shows how she navigates her first few weeks on Gordon’s writing team as the only woman in the writer’s room.
In episode 2, Midge is being interviewed at a later time in her life about her long career. It was a really bittersweet moment for me to watch and it made me think of when I would watch veteran actors like Maggie Smith, Meryl Streep and Sally Field and how they had such long and prosperous careers, and I’m sure there were many ups and downs but they worked so hard in their careers and as a young woman it was inspiring to watch this part where Midge is interviewed. She recalls the good times, and the bad times, and doesn’t provide super personal details to the interviewer but at the end of the interview she shows all of the clothing that she is giving away as part of the nonprofit she started in Ethan and Esther’s name to provide services to children in need. It shows all the outfits she wore on the road as a comedian and at home, and everything she wore is in style. Joel is staying with his parents and is still recovering from his injuries, and Midge visits him to check in on him. Joel tells Midge about breaking up with Mei and that Mei got an abortion and moved to Chicago, and Midge tries to comfort him, but Joel refuses because he is still processing the breakup. Meanwhile, Midge is taking the subway to her new job at Gordon Ford’s office, only to be followed by a guy she dated in a previous season (played by Milo Ventimiglia.) In the episode she met a dashing man in the park and they hit it off and started dating, but then she goes back to his house and sleeps with him, and the next morning his wife walks in the bedroom and finds her husband sleeping with Midge. This doesn’t age well, especially because Midge brings it up in one of her most important comedy gigs. She is given an opportunity to perform at a luncheon for Jacqueline (Jackie) Kennedy, the first lady and John F. Kennedy’s wife. As I learned from watching The Crown and the biopic Jackie, and reading some articles, JFK had a lot of extramarital affairs. So when Midge is trying to come up with new material for the gig, she talks about sleeping with a guy who is married, and Jackie breaks down crying because it reminded her of her husband’s infidelity. In episode 2 of the final season, the ex-date confronts Midge in the New York subway station and she tries to get away from him but he keeps running after her to apologize and ask for her forgiveness, but she wants nothing to do with him after that. He finally catches up to her and explains that him and his wife are getting a divorce but she is not interested in dating this guy again. He understands though and asks if they will see each other in the park again, and they say their goodbyes.
Midge enters the new workplace at Gordon Ford’s office and finds that she is the only woman on the writer’s team and that it’s a bunch of boys, a boys’ club. When she first enters, the secretaries (all female) give her a hard time but she finds Mike Carr, and he confronts her about Susie being rude to him. She tries to explain but he tells her to give Susie a message and flips her the middle finger, which is what Susie did to him when she booked Midge a gig on Gordon Ford’s show to prove Mike wrong. When Midge enters the writer’s room, they are reluctant to welcome her, seeing as how this is still the 1960s and women were still not seen as having potential as comics. None of their jokes are remotely funny, but when Midge writes new material and tries to share her own jokes, they interrupt her with singing whenever one of them uses the bathroom in the office. And they grill her about writing new material. However, they are all under fire and facing the stressful wrath of Gordon, who Midge finds out is not a nice guy. He basically rips up everyone’s writing material if it doesn’t meet their standards and everyone has to cook up fresh material within minutes of Gordon going on the show. It reminded me of the movie, Late Night, with Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling. Emma Thompson plays an acerbic late night host whose show is decreasing in ratings because many people don’t find her style of humor funny, but everything changes when a young optimistic comedian from Pennsylvania named Molly (Mindy Kaling) joins the writer’s room because Molly is a woman of color and she wants more diversity in the all white male writer’s room. It is a serious challenge and Molly faces a lot of discrimination from the beginning. The writer’s room is full of men, and Katherine is heading it, but she doesn’t praise Molly’s efforts and often ignores her. The men on the writer’s team think she is the office assistant rather than a new member of the writer’s room and give her administrative tasks like getting them coffee and treats, but she has to remind them over and over of her place in the writer’s room. One night, Katherine attends Molly’s stand up comedy show and overhears her talking about how mean Katherine is to her, and she begins to value Molly’s ideas and her show gets bumped up in ratings. Eventually, Katherine recruits more women and people of underrepresented groups to join the writer’s room and has Molly promoted to help lead the team.
Meanwhile, Rose is walking and talking with her friend and then finds a bunch of firetrucks outside and we see that the building where she visited her fortune teller burned down, and she calls her son Noah, who used to work for the CIA but now got new work as an analyst, and asks if they can put out a search party because she thinks that the mean clique of competitive matchmakers set the fire. In an earlier season, Rose becomes a professional matchmaker, but she is confronted by three other matchmakers who do everything in their power to stop Rose from doing her work. Rose always met with her fortune teller and she would have her predict Midge’s future with tea leaves, but then the fortune teller left and was replaced with a new lady who doesn’t do tea leaves and instead has Rose eat pizza and watch TV. Abe meets with a woman at his workplace (he works as a columnist for a newspaper after losing his job at Bell Labs a few seasons ago) and they are having a great conversation, but then the lady flirts with Abe and puts her hand on his knee in a suggestive way. He feels conflicted and asks his coworker if what that lady did was sexual, and his coworker tells him to not tell his wife, Rose, about his encounter with the lady. Abe keeps it a secret but it pains him to do so, and he brings Rose out to dinner and does the same gesture that the lady did to him: putting his hand on her knee. She is surprised but she lets him do it, and he wants to because he really loves Rose and doesn’t want an affair with that other woman.
I can’t wait to watch episode 3!
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