‘Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ portrays a marvelously funny woman
Midge Maisel has everything she imagined as a New York City woman in 1958: perfect husband, two cute kids and a “classic six” apartment on Riverside Drive.
Then, by chance, Midge scratches an itch she never dreamed she had when she unleashes her robust comic sensibility on the stage of a Greenwich Village nightclub.
By then, her family life is in turmoil. All the better for fueling her fledgling stand-up career, which is pushed along by the gruff barmaid who hires herself to be Midge’s manager.
This is the premise of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” a lush and delightful new comedy-drama from partners Amy Sherman-Palladino (“Gilmore Girls”) and Daniel Palladino (“Family Guy”). Its eight-episode season can be seen on Amazon Prime.
Midge is played by Rachel Brosnahan (previously seen in a polar-opposite role as call girl Rachel Posner in “House of Cards”). Midge is lovable, outspoken and unsinkable as she trades her traditional life to crash the ultimate man’s world, stand-up comedy.
The role required Brosnahan, like her character, to break in as a stand-up.
“Midge and I got to have this really lovely parallel journey,” says Brosnahan. “As she was learning how to become a stand-up — how to work a room, how to read an audience — I was learning those things, too. There is a point in the season’s next-to-last episode when Midge has a ‘tight 10 (minutes of comic material).’ When we shot that, for the first time I felt like I was really doing stand-up. I had a long time before then to learn.”
The series is set a half-century ago, but it arrives with eerily unsought timeliness.
“It’s a show about a woman finding her voice, literally, when that wasn’t expected or encouraged,” says Brosnahan. “Midge is speaking up and speaking out in a way that was radical at that time, and also is radical in many ways today. I think this show highlights how far we have come and how much has changed, but also how far we have NOT come, and the battles we are still fighting today in so many different facets of womanhood.” Midge’s manager, Susie Myerson, is played by Alex Borstein.
“There’s always a battle to be fought in gender equality,” Borstein says. “Women are different from men, and that’s never ever gonna change. But the goal is to learn how the two sides can communicate effectively, and coexist, and share the power.”
With Midge and Susie, there’s no kowtowing to men. Think of “Mrs. Maisel” as a female buddy comedy with real-life trappings. “The series wasn’t intended to be a sort of political piece, but it’s taken on an additional layer of meaning,” Sherman-Palladino says, “thanks to events I wish didn’t exist.”