‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Final Season Deserves Your Attention
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I’ll miss the coats most of all.
OK, that’s a little glib. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel brings a lot to the table, and reducing it to its main character’s wardrobe is something that the final season actively comments on. But the coats! They’re so great!
I’ll miss them on the sides of MTA buses, on subway posters, and in the ads that Amazon plasters across every single website I read when a new season is coming out. And I’ll miss sitting slack-jawed while watching them cascade down Manhattan streets that have been meticulously decorated to be period-perfect to the show’s early-’60s setting. While the idea of giving showrunners blank checks has gotten exhausting, there was something thrilling about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s production value—not to mention its proof that it is worthwhile to throw bags of money at shows that don’t feature superheroes and take place in Westeros or Middle-earth.
Amy Sherman-Palladino, who created Gilmore Girls before doing Maisel with Amazon’s Prime Video, told me once that she had to argue with The CW about having the budget to make snow in Stars Hollow for Gilmore Girls’ winter-set episodes. Now, she’s staging a massive, complicated sequence in a NYC subway transformed to look—and operate!—as it did 60 years ago, for no justifiable narrative reason than the sheer hell of it. And let’s not forget to mention how fabulous Midge Maisel’s coat, worn by Rachel Brosnahan, looks during it!
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But beyond outerwear, what is Mrs. Maisel’s legacy? That’s something the show itself is overtly grappling with in its final season, which launches its first three episodes on Friday.
It turns out that Mrs. Maisel becomes the success she always dreamed of. That’s not a spoiler, as it’s the clever conceit of this fifth, final season—the most fun I’ve had watching this series since its early, zeitgeist-seizing run. Those first three episodes begin with flashes to the future, where we meet Midge’s adult children and see how her incredible amount of fame and fortune affected them growing up.
I was struck by this framing device, given the most common critique of the recent seasons of Mrs. Maisel. The show seemed to be running on a hamster wheel, repeating the same story arc over and over again: Midge comes close to her biggest break, gets in her own way and screws it up, and then has to pound the pavement as the scrappy underdog again. Knowing that she ends up being a hit certainly adds intrigue to this swan-song run towards the top.
But there’s also a metaness to all of this. Sure, we know what the fictional Mrs. Maisel’s legacy will be, but what of the show itself? The industry and our TV-watching habits are in a different universe now than when the show premiered in 2017. Mrs. Maisel was not just one of the hottest shows in the still-new landscape of streaming, but with a quality that warranted Emmys, magazine covers, and a mass excitement for new episodes that still proves to be a rarity for streaming series.
But it’s an interesting thing to consider, as Mrs. Maisel’s final season premieres. Regardless of whether it’s still good (it is), do people still care about it?
What it means to “care” about a show these days is a loaded conversation.
Did you, perhaps, hear that something HUGE happened on Succession Sunday night? Was your social media timeline overloaded with memes, reactions, and complaints from people who had plans that Sunday—it was Easter!—and therefore didn’t watch the episode live and had it spoiled for them? Did it seem, based on all of that, that it was quite possibly the biggest episode of television that has ever aired?
If that’s the case, would you be surprised to learn that it was only watched by 2.5 million people—and that was a record high for the series? More people watched American Idol, the America’s Funniest Home Videos reboot hosted by Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and a CBS tribute to the Beach Boys on Sunday night. I’ve seen nary a meme about a single one of those shows. I certainly haven’t read 473 think pieces about them.
I don’t want to out myself in this way, because it could be used to suggest that I’m no longer good at my job, but I have no idea how or why people get excited about TV shows anymore.
On Yellowjackets, people are literally cooking and eating their best friend, yet it’s overshadowed by an episode of TV in which a very old man dies, as is foretold in the show’s very title. Last season, everyone I knew was fighting about whether or not Ted Lasso was getting too dark. Is anyone even watching Ted Lasso right now? The most-watched show on cable, Yellowstone, has had some of the wildest behind-the-scenes drama and star diva behavior I can remember in years, and no one’s “talking” about it.
Is there buzz for the return of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel? Not that I could discern. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to watch it in droves. And it certainly doesn’t mean that it’s bad.
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Alex Borstein, who has won two deserved Emmy Awards for her performance as Susie, gives a tour de force this season—which, considering how dynamic she’s always been, says something. The right dosage of quirkiness has finally been realized for Marin Hinkle and Tony Shalhoub’s characters, who are more a hoot than ever, and even Joel (Michael Zegen) is no longer insufferable. (A huge milestone!) And let it be known that there is a scene between Midge and Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby) at the airport—JFK’s TWA Hotel was practically built to be the set for a Mrs. Maisel episode—in which Kirby looks at Brosnahan in a way that may actually be the hottest thing I have ever seen on television.
At this point in its run, the show’s conveyor belt of quips and rapid-fire dialogue, or its seemingly unnecessary jaunts into wacky subplots featuring tertiary characters, isn’t going to win over new fans. But that’s the pleasure of a long-running show coming to an end. The challenge is to comfort the fans as they say goodbye, not ditch them for a new audience.
In that regard, this last season fits like a tailored burgundy peacoat. It proves that there’s going to be something to miss when it’s gone.
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