‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Is Amy Sherman-Palladino’s Most Complex and Provocative Work To Date

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel opens on one young woman’s triumph. It’s her wedding day and she’s the one giving the toast. Is that what’s done? No, but this is Miriam “Midge” Maisel (played with bludgeoning charm by House of Cards and Manhattan alum Rachel Brosnahan) and she wants to make it clear that she is the architect of her life. She’s planned everything perfectly from her Bryn Mawr education to the exact measurement of her calves. Midge Maisel is a woman with the perfect life…until, well, she isn’t. Flash forward a few years and her hack husband is cheating on her with his ditzy secretary. He wants a divorce and she gets drunk on Manischewitz and hustles on down to the Gaslight Café, a comedy club, where she takes the stage and brings down the house.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is about a woman discovering herself in the crucible of failure. As the illusion of a perfect life crumbles around Midge, she learns that she has more to offer the world than she initially thought. Her husband might steal punchlines from Bob Newhart, but she is a natural stand-up comic. She discovers her gift during the latter 1950s, a time of transition for America, for women, and for the art form of comedy. As creator Amy Sherman-Palladino joked to a group of reporters at a set visit in July, the central conflict tearing away at her latest heroine is this: “It’s that whole world of, like, maybe there will be a doctor who will take me away from this at some point!” Sherman-Paladino said to laughs, before adding, “Or…I can open for Carson?” And it’s that very tension — between what women are supposed to want and what they really dream of doing — that feeds the humor, melancholy, and sheer exuberance of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Even though The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is set in the roar and rhythm of New York City of the late ’50s, the new Amazon series is also a thrilling rebuttal to the current zeitgeist. In a time when the news cycle has been inundated with stories oozing with misogyny, the show’s optimism is cathartic to the extreme. Midge’s journey into the netherworld of stand-up comedy finds her trying to push her way into one of the oldest boys clubs there is. Instead of being cowed by the injustices thrown at her, Midge rises up. You know, as many women determined to succeed do.

“The story I really wanted to do was a story of a woman in the ‘50s who didn’t hate her life.”—Amy Sherman-Palladino

Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino has a well-established track record for writing witty women. The writer/director/producer got her start as a staff writer on Roseanne and after getting nominated for an Emmy and bopping around various ’90s sitcoms, she successfully pitched a dramedy about a super-close mother and daughter called Gilmore Girls. The series was a critical and cult hit that ran for seven seasons, although Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, her husband and producing partner, departed ahead of the final season. Gilmore Girls stood out for a couple of reasons: it featured an ultra specific, fast-paced style of witty banter that was pure Sherman-Palladino, and it was about the personal lives of women. The series wasn’t focused on a crime syndicate or an anti-hero, but a family of women making do in a quirky Connecticut town. In 2015, Netflix announced that they had reached a deal with Sherman-Palladino for a limited series revival that would wrap up the story as she had intended. Before Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life debuted on Netflix in Fall 2016, the streaming service’s biggest rival, Amazon, announced that they had ordered a new pilot from Sherman-Palladino called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
“The story I really wanted to do was a story of a woman in the ‘50s who didn’t hate her life. Because I feel like we’ve seen that a lot. We’ve seen a lot of women in the ‘50s staring out the window going, ‘What’s over there?‘ You know, drinking her sherry and popping her Seconal and smoking her cigarettes as the husband, you know, puts on her dress in the back. I think we’ve seen the repression and the unhappiness,” Sherman-Palladino said. “I wanted to do a story about a woman who thought she scored! Who thought she made it! And then…bam! It all falls apart and in falling apart, she discovers an ambition and a need to speak and a voice that she just frankly didn’t know were there.”

Narratively, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel pulls off a juggling act. Even as Midge begins to dip her toes into the world of stand-up comedy, she must still deal with the fallout of her separation. That means that Midge’s relationships with her parents, hoity-toity Upper West Side types played by Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle, and her break up with husband Joel (Michael Zegen) take as much space as the stand-up storylines. Midge is forced to confront whether or not the “picture perfect” life she’s built for herself is really the one she wants. Does she really like being a mother? Where is she going to live? What does it mean to be a divorcée in the 1950s? Does she want to work? Besides stand-up, what is she good at? All these questions slink into frame just in time for Midge to examine them on stage.
“It’s not so much a show about stand-up comedy,” Sherman-Palladino emphasized. “Because stand-up comedy is tricky — stand-up comics are very dark and sad. It’s hard. It’s so hard. It’s lonely. You know you stand-up there and it’s just you who’s the loser. You can’t blame the script or the director or the lighting or the choreographer. If you suck, you suck.”
Nevertheless, it is still a show about stand-up comedy. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel does its best to recreate the verve of the scene in the 1950s. Luke Kirby reprises his role from the pilot as legendary comic Lenny Bruce, who quickly becomes Midge’s best pal in the scene, and comedian Alex Borstein (Family Guy) plays Susie, Midge’s manager and champion. The show nails specific parts of the craft rarely included onscreen — like checking your notes after a set, languishing for hours in a café for stage time, and spending time bouncing around town just to watch other more advanced comics practice their jokes. The Gaslight Café is imagined as home base for Midge, and while the location was a real-life nexus for comedy and folk music in the ’50s, the show’s set designer, four time Emmy winner Bill Groom, admitted to journalists that they played with the space’s layout a bit to accommodate filming and literal “bathroom” jokes.

Early press suggested the show would be a fictionalized version of Joan Rivers’ life story, a claim that Sherman-Palladino immediately refuted. “Well, you know, Joan Rivers is her own fabulous story. Somebody should do the Joan Rivers story. Joan Rivers is like the goddess. I don’t know who does her story. I don’t know how to do her story. I don’t know who plays Joan Rivers.”
Sherman-Palladino may have no clue who could possibly play Joan Rivers, but she and Palladino found their Midge Maisel in rising star Rachel Brosnahan. “This was kind of another part like Lorelai Gilmore, another part that Amy created, that was just impossible to cast. There was probably just one perfect person out there,” Palladino told reporters. “[Brosnahan], again, glows, and there’s also sort of an intensity to her look. There’s a real intelligence behind her, which is another aspect of all stand-up comedians. I don’t think there’s any like, dumb, stand-up comedians.”

“Not if they’re good,” Sherman-Palladino sniped. She explained, “Her comedy needed to be intellectual. It needed to have an emotional through-line as we weren’t probably going to find a stand-up comedienne to come in and embody all the aspects of this role. We knew that we were probably going to have to take that shot on a great actress and see if people will buy her becoming a stand-up comedian.”

“It’s that whole world of, like, maybe there will be a doctor who will take me away from this at some point! Or…I can open for Carson?”

One journalist at the set visit asked Sherman-Palladino how Brosnahan won the part, explaining that the actress didn’t really exude “comedian” on House of Cards. “No, because we don’t tie her up, drown her, we haven’t strangled her, we haven’t zip-tied her yet, she hasn’t been dismembered and thrown in a ditch…” she deadpanned. “It’s unbelievable. This lovely girl, who they just keep killing.”
Sherman said, “She got typecast as a victim, weirdly. She’s very happy to be doing this role. She gets to laugh, she gets to smile!”
“She gets to put lipstick on!” Sherman-Palladino added.
“She gets to say things,” Palladino said. “And that’s who she is.”
The exchange, though tongue-in-cheek, highlights the fact that other showrunners have seen a talent like Brosnahan’s and decided to cast her as a victim as opposed to a heroine. It’s not specific to Brosnahan, though. It’s a trend in the industry. As Variety’s Mo Ryan reported last year, rape and violence against women are often used in television shows as narrative crutches. One Fox executive said it’s become so rampant in spec scripts that, “It has become a plague on the industry.”

Which is why a show like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel feels so revelatory at this moment. To center a show around a woman who is upbeat in the face of setback and who is, as Sherman puts it, discovering a “superpower,” is not just inspiring. It’s important. It is a portrayal of women as they really are – dynamic characters leading their own lives, and not ancillary body parts to be crushed for shock value.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is also the type of show that Amazon needs right now. In the midst of the public allegations lobbed at former Amazon Studios head Roy Price, it was pointed out that the network hasn’t had a great track record when it’s come to stories of female empowerment. Good Girls Revolt, a drama about the real-life battles of 1960s feminists to combat sexual harassment in the newsroom, was bizarrely canceled by Price even though it received good reviews and generally positive word of mouth. There’s no official way of telling if the show was a hit for Amazon, but producer Dana Calvo suggested it was when the news first hit last December. An out-and-loud feminist show like this is what Amazon’s current slate needs.
Politics aside, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is good. Every performance is nuanced, arresting, and incandescent. In particular, Rachel Brosnahan should be a shoo-in for a Golden Globe nomination this year. The writing ranks as some of the (Sherman)-Palladinos’ best and the production design is lush, detailed, and gorgeously lived-in. The money that Amazon sprung on meticulously reconstructing 1950s Manhattan and giving Midge custom-made dresses inspired by French designers gives it a cinematic quality that Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life was sorely lacking. It is Sherman-Palladino’s most complex and provocative work to date, full of the same wit and heart that defines her work, but framed with something truly revolutionary to say.
And what is she saying? What is the point of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel? That at any time in her life, a woman has the right to reinvent herself and her idea of the perfect life. No matter what the cultural climate has to say about it.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is now streaming on Amazon. 

Watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime Video