Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Earlier this month, Amazon ordered an unprecedented two season pickup for Amy Sherman-Palladino‘s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, based off the response to the best pilot in recent memory. In an age where most comedy takes itself way too seriously, Maisel‘s pilot had a buzzy, jangly energy that appealed to every demographic, or at least to every age bracket of middle- to upper-middle-class white Americans, its target audience. Every moment of the hour brims with joy. It’s a perfect antidote to a dour television decade.
In particular, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel feels like a lightly feminist response to Mad Men, the drama that defined not just this generation, but the two generations before as well. Both shows begin in approximately the same moment in history; Mad Men‘s pilot takes place in 1959, Maisel in 1958. And both are completely New York-centric. Midge Maisel’s husband’s office looks exactly like something out of Season One of Sterling Cooper. Midge could definitely have run into Betty Draper at the perfume counter.
But from there, the shows diverge. Where Mad Men presented the late ’50s as a shallow façade, Maisel shows light, energy, and possibility. On Mad Men, the extended family is a fragile thing, even a lie. For Maisel, even the looming tragedy of divorce doesn’t break the family spirit. Matthew Weiner’s vision of New York always resembled a Cassavettes film, or a Douglas Sirk weeper. Sherman-Palladino recalls something closer to Bells Are Ringing or Pillow Talk, where even in a tight spot, love and fun are always around the corner in New York City.
In particular, Maisel presents an optimistic and loving vision of the golden age of American Jewry, ever trapped in the shadow of Goodbye, Columbus. Unless it’s Larry David talking, a voice that cannot be duplicated, Judaism usually gets portrayed as something repressive. It’s either the Talmudic toothache of Transparent or a glib set of assimilated references on The Goldbergs. As for historical Judaism, forget it. The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man slammed the door on the fish-fingered shtetl rabbis of old.
As with everything else, Matthew Weiner has unresolved issues about his Judaism. Mad Men‘s main Jewish characters suffer horrifying fates. Rachel Menken —an analog to Midge Maisel in looks, age, and ambition— dies of stomach cancer for her original ethnic sin. Poor Jewy Michael Ginsberg, trapped in a bad apartment with his ballgame-listening dad, ends up slicing off his nipple on the way to the asylum.
But The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel doesn’t punish its characters for Ashkenazi heritage. Instead, it celebrates the best elements of Jewish culture. Everyone is loud, everyone (except the bartender) lives in fabulous digs, show tunes blare from every opening, the deli is fresh at Zabar’s, and Mort Sahl does two sets on a summer Saturday night at Grossinger’s. Our heroine is happy to overturn the pushcart by revealing there’s shrimp in the eggrolls, but her impulse comes from a kind of brimming glee, not from angst. Even the dark Jewish prince Lenny Bruce, who previously had only been portrayed in pop culture as a doomed figure in black-and-white, gets a colorful shrug and a jazzy musical backdrop.
Whenever Mad Men dips its toes in bohemian waters, things turn dark. Below 14th Street lurks ruin. Betty Draper searches for a neighbor girl in a wretched squat. Poor pathetic Paul Kinsey shaves his head and sings Hare Krishna when all he really wants to do is sell a Star Trek script. As for Don Draper’s first (depicted) lover, also named Midge, in 1959 she’s a spunky independent graphic designer, but by the late 60s she’s a dying junkie dependent on a creepy guy for survival. In Mad Men, artistic ambition (beyond selling Secor Laxatives) equals certain doom, especially for women.
But when Midge goes downtown, at first with her husband and later by herself, the show sings the praises of a lost New York. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel‘s attitude is Positively 4th Street. The grim open-mic stage with the flushing toilet directly behind, portrayed on Mad Men as a place of infinite hypocrisy, suddenly represents hope and ambition. For Midge Maisel, culture’s underground brings possibilities of life, not death. The characters in Mad Men struggle with the cruelties of capitalism. They’re Willy Loman times 100. If they dare step out of that narrative, like Ken Cosgrove and his novels, they’re rewarded with the loss of an eye, or worse. In Maisel, the lodestar is getting to be more or less as good as Bob Newhart. Even going to jail feels kind of fun.
With Midge Maisel, Sherman-Palladino has created an anti-Don Draper to rewrite history. Midge has nothing to lie about. Her past, like her future, is bright, not dark. She’s Joan Rivers crossed with Mary Richards, an enormously appealing heroine for this time, or any time. For the next two seasons at least, she’ll be the Queen Of New York. She’s got a whiff of that sweet smell of success, and there’s always a brisket in the oven.
Neal Pollack (@nealpollack) is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.
