Simply Marvellous

At the outset of Amazon Prime’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) is a Jewish housewife living in New York’s Upper West Side in the 1950s. She has no idea her husband is cheating on her, until one night his standup comedy performance bombs and he decides to leave home.

Drunk, Midge returns to the legendary venue, The Gaslight Café, walks onto stage and begins ranting about her husband. She ends up getting arrested for lewd behaviour and being bailed out by her soon-tobecome manager Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein). Thus begins our show.

Like the wildly successful Madmen, the story takes place in New York on the eve of the wonderful cultural explosion of the 1960s that is to follow. The hippies are starting to arrive, African-Americans are starting to ask questions and women are starting to swear in public. The female characters in this show are patronised, ridiculed and sidelined by the men. The only established female comic we see in the show casually tells Mrs Maisel, “Men don’t want to laugh at you. They want to f*** you.” And this seems to trace the journey in the 1950s to #MeToo and Time’s Up in 2018. So much has changed, but then not much has changed at all.

Brosnahan and Borstein are fantastic, the script is outstanding, and the show is filmed like a play flitting in and out of typical New York apartments and bars. The lines are brisk and full of one-liners that presume some knowledge of the period and certainly of typical Jewish comedy. The justification of characters is left to the imagination and explained away with the passing of time. Midge goes from wedded bliss to break-up to shop clerk to “comedienne” within the same episode. The sets and dialogue might be from 1958 but the characters seem very 2018. Laugh, smile wryly and, for heaven’s sake, stop checking your phones to fact check. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is ironic, amusing and, for certain moments, bloody funny. And that’s all there is to it.