The Marvelous Mrs. Maise l team talks putting Midge in a writers' room for season 5
Midge Maisel has traded in her microphone for a pencil for the time being.
In the fifth and final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, aspiring comic, Midge (Rachel Brosnahan), decides to try a new way in to the business — via the writers' room on The Gordon Ford Show, a late-night talk show in the vein of The Tonight Show.
"It made me very uncomfortable," creator Amy Sherman-Palladino quips of writing and spending so much time shooting in a world she is all too familiar with in her own life. "But it was a different world, and we wanted to make the audience have different experiences. This era is the birth of television — when television was starting to catch on and really be important to people. I Love Lucy was a thing. It felt like a good time to to throw her into that new mix and see what happened. Again, it's a time when there were basically no women, it was Madeline Pugh and out. So, it was another area that Midge would have to conquer herself because there was no one to even pattern herself after."
(Speaking of Madeline Pugh, who was one of the main writers on I Love Lucy, she does get name-checked in a joke about all women writers knowing one another.)
Philippe Antonello/Prime Video Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) starts a new job as a writer on The Gordon Ford Show on 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel'
Sherman-Palladino particularly enjoyed bringing in a new crop of actors to make up the milieu of the writers' room. "It was a fun set, and it was fun to get those different voices in the room," she says. "Weirdly, those actors all bonded in a very strange way. They started acting like writers in a writers' room. They would hang out in that writers' room like it was a real writers' room, even when we weren't shooting, which was odd."
The career shift is not only a big change for Midge, but for the woman who plays her. "It was strange not to be doing as much stand up and sometimes even felt frustrating," Rachel Brosnahan says. "Then I realized that that's the key to what Midge is experiencing in this season too. She is trying to find a way to get to the end that she and Susie [Alex Borstein] have envisioned now for so long together. In this season, she puts her trust in Susie and the idea that this is a way in the door that we haven't tried yet. She's giving it 110 percent. It was fun to build the world of late night in the 1960s, and to live in these amazing office sets."
Since Mrs. Maisel premiered in 2017, Midge has been compared to iconic comedian Joan Rivers, as a bawdy, trailblazing comic. Rivers had a close personal connection with late-night television, breaking out on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show and becoming the first woman to host her own late-night program. So, parallels between Midge and Rivers seem to only be stronger with this season 5 storyline.
But Brosnahan sees any ties between Midge and Rivers as a narrative from outside of the show. "I feel like that was a narrative that was more born from the press than it ever was internally," she says. "I was told that Midge was first and foremost inspired by Amy's father and that she was an amalgamation of a number of different pioneering comedians at the time. Then, also something totally singular."
In fact, Brosnahan sought inspiration in another female comic of the era. "In preparing to play Midge, I googled the first female stand-up comedian and a woman named Jean Carroll came up, who is a lesser-known comedian now, but was brilliant and so funny and so sharp," she says. "There's a couple short clips of her on YouTube that I studied religiously. I borrowed a number of physical gestures from Jean Carroll. She spoke so quickly and she wore the pearls and the beautiful dresses and she looked like a picture perfect 1950s housewife. For a while I was very certain that Midge was inspired by Jean Carroll, and I was later told no."
Turns out Midge is an entity all her own.
The Marvelous Maisel is now streaming on Prime Video with new episodes dropping every Friday through May 26.
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