Amy Sherman-Palladino’s comedy about a 1950s housewife who takes up stand-up is quick, handsome and built around a lead performance of real nerve. It talks too fast to notice that everyone in it sounds the same, and it runs longer than it should.
Amy Sherman-Palladino made her name with Gilmore Girls, in which everyone talked faster than anyone else on television. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel moves the talking to New York in the 1950s and gives it a reason. Miriam Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) is a housewife with children and a husband, Joel (Michael Zegen), whose hobby is performing other people’s stand-up material at a club downtown. When he leaves her, she goes to the club drunk, takes the stage, and is better at it than he ever was. The show is good: quick, handsome and carried by a lead who never asks to be liked. It is also five seasons built on one voice, and by the end we knew the rhythm of every line before it arrived.
Brosnahan is the reason it works. Midge is vain, tactless, rich and certain, and Brosnahan plays all of that straight rather than winking past it. She lets you see what the tidy life has cost before Midge has worked it out herself. When she finally stands at a microphone the relief on her face is real, and we were surprised by how much we wanted her to be good.
Alex Borstein’s Susie Myerson, who works the door at the club and decides to manage her, is the best thing in it. Susie is short, broke, dressed like a stagehand and permanently furious, and Borstein gives her something Midge never has, which is the ability to listen. Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle, as Midge’s parents Abe and Rose Weissman, begin as types and become the people we most wanted to spend time with; Shalhoub’s Abe treats every family crisis as a problem set by an idiot. Kevin Pollak and Caroline Aaron, as Joel’s parents Moishe and Shirley, are louder and thinner. Luke Kirby drifts through as Lenny Bruce, the one comic in the series who sounds as though he is thinking.
It looks lovely, and it knows it. Bill Groom’s production design gives us a flat of moulded ceilings and pink bathrooms, a department store counter, and a basement club with a floor you would not want to touch. The camera, with M. David Mullen one of four cinematographers, glides through all of it in long unbroken takes. The clothes are coats and hats in the colours of boiled sweets. Kate Sanford, Tim Streeto and the other editors cut to the dialogue, so the cutting is fast whenever the talking is fast, which is always. Eric Gorfain’s music is brassy and brisk and sits under the lines rather than against them.
The trouble is the voice. Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, who share writing and directing credits across the run, have one way of writing a scene: two people, a torrent of words, a joke in every line, no pauses. Midge talks this way, and so do Susie, Abe, Rose, the shop girl and the policeman. Everyone is a comic. That makes Midge’s act harder to judge, because it sounds like the rest of the dialogue delivered standing up, and it flattens a world that was meant to be resisting her. Somewhere in the third season we noticed we had stopped laughing at the jokes and started admiring the speed. The show also cannot bear to let her lose for long. She stumbles, and then someone important happens to be watching. One dissenting critic found her impossible to like; we would not go that far, but we understood.
Set against Gilmore Girls, this is the more ambitious programme and the less relaxed one. Forty-three episodes across five seasons, from 2017 to 2023, is a long time to spend with people who never breathe, and the later runs send Midge further from the club and the flat, where the show is at its best, and grow baggier as they go. The first season, at eight episodes, is the tightest.
Watch it one episode at a time. Taken in a run it turns into a wall of sound and the clothes stop registering. Taken slowly it is a smart, fond, expensive comedy about a woman who was only ever going to be interesting once her life fell apart, and Brosnahan makes you glad it did.
