Stuff You Should Be Watching: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Oh, you lucky people, Amazon has given you a present this holiday season. Amazon has given you an uncensored Amy Sherman Palladino, a heroine who just wants to be funny, a female friendship that is touching and hilarious, amazing coats, a complex family dynamic, and a show that is centered around being Jewish in New York City.

Did I mention the coats?

Season 2 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, winner of a multiple Emmys and Golden Globes and the bane of my coat budget, drops on Amazon Prime on December 5th.

When we first meet Miriam “Midge” Maisel, she’s giving her own wedding toast, which is hilarious, and then we cut to four years later. She and her husband have a comfortable life on the Upper West Side, where he’s in advertising and moonlights in stand-up comedy. They go to the seedy Gaslight Cafe in the Village, where he…. tries to be funny.

Then, on Yom Kippur, he announces that he’s leaving, because he isn’t happy.

So Midge, in her nightgown and drunk off her ass on kosher wine, goes down to the cafe and accidentally improves a comedy set. Throughout the first season (8 episodes, so it’s a pleasant meal, and not, like, a BINGE), Midge and the booker at the Gaslight, Susie (Alex Borstein) navigate friendship and business as they try to get Midge’s comedy career off the ground.

At the same time, Midge needs to navigate life without her husband, and figure out what she actually wants: maybe what she’s been told she should want for her entire life isn’t actually what she wants?

The are many many many things to love about this show, but let’s start first with the cast. Sherman-Palladino dialogue isn’t for the faint of heart, and you need a lead actress who can talk fast and hit the timing. Emmy winner Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge is perfection. She’s cute as a button, can nail the accent and the rhythm like she was born in the Borscht Belt, and she has charisma to spare.

Emmy Winner Alex Borstein has been in all of Sherman-Palladino’s shows, and her chemistry with Rachel is off the charts. Midge’s husband, Joel, is played by Michael Zegen (Boardwalk Empire, Rescue Me), and he’s great at playing a total schmuck.

Midge’s parents are played by Marin Hinkle (she’s the principal on Speechless) and Tony Shalhoub, and they’re wonderful together. Kevin Pollack plays Joel’s father, and we have all of these wonderful actors who can be hilarious and talk really fast. I know I keep harping on the ability to talk fast, but seriously, Sherman-Palladino scripts tend to be a lot longer than standard TV scripts because so many words are crammed into the same amount of time, so being able to keep up with all the words is a necessary skill.

There’s also the specificity of the relationship between Joel and Midge: when Joel and Midge go to bed, she waits until he’s asleep and then sneaks to the bathroom to take off her makeup, put her hair in curlers, and put on face cream, and then she wakes up before he does to put her hair and face to rights.

This is their relationship. There’s so much she does just so he doesn’t struggle with reality (like, she would unhook every other hook of her bra so he wouldn’t struggle with it, she would make brisket and latkes to help him get a better performance time), and then he fucking leaves her. FOR HIS SECRETARY. He’s such a schmuck. He doesn’t realize how tidy she made his life. He does not deserve her, and she deserves someone who requires less work.

But, and this is the best part, the show doesn’t even have another dude in the wing for her. The love story is between Midge and Suzy and their friendship, and Midge and Self Actualization.

Setting the show during the late 1950s is vital to the aesthetic (Midge has so many coats) but also to world of comedy: Lenny Bruce makes an appearance, along with Red Skelton, Bob Newhart, and others. There was the first tremors of the counterculture and the sexual revolution, with second wave feminism and the very specific cultural hangover the US had from WWII. All of this boils together to make Midge recognize things she’s ANGRY about. She has a lot of rage that comes out in VERY funny ways.

But it’s also GORGEOUS. So many clothes. Midge and her family are very upper class, so they have the money to buy ALL OF THESE COATS, and have these huge Upper West Side apartments. And then you contrast that life style with the Village and downtown and Susie’s garden level studio with a Murphy bed and the Gaslight Cafe and it’s disgusting bathroom – so much attention was paid to the period details (down to the Pyrex casserole, and the old school Tupperware!) and I appreciated every bit.

This is a show about reinventing yourself, and making unlikely friends, and learning a new skill, and the try and fail and try again of it all. It’s also unapologetically Jewish (as opposed to, say, Seinfeld or Mad About You, which were both kind of ambiguously Jewish), and may very well make you feel a little bit better about difficult family members this holiday season. At least your mother isn’t harping on you about how your baby’s forehead is too big.

Season One is currently streaming on Amazon, and season 2 will drop on December 5th.