Illustration by Tanya Bearson
For eight hours last week I cared more about Miriam “Midge” Maisel than I did my own survival. I’m a cautious consumera — my disbelief tends to suspend itself too high to fall without bonking its noggin, making me wary of any fictional character asking me to invest myself in their story. But The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, is that rare breed: it’s real—though not in the way one would expect.
At the start of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Midge seems to have it all by 1950’s standards: a massive apartment in the Upper West Side, a husband, numerous spectacular dresses, the approval of the influential Rabbi Weisman, two fabulous kids, and parents so loaded they could take a bath in money every single morning and burn it when they were done. Then Midge’s husband, Joel, leaves her. The problem is not so much that she’s single, a 1950’s nightmare, but rather that Midge has been using all of her energy, all of her passion and drive, to take care of him. So Midge drinks an entire bottle of kosher wine. She wanders into the rock-bottom club where she’d been supporting Joel’s comedy career and lays down a raw, impulsive, obscenely funny feminist manifesto that puts the entire 1950’s to shame.
Comedy seems to be Midge’s true calling, but she keeps looking back at her former life, trapped between the boxes she’s spent her entire life ticking (home, children, family) and what seems to be an isolated incident could destroy everything she’s worked for. But when Susie, a foulmouthed, talent scout, recognizes potential, Midge starts to look forward to what she can become without self-imposed limits. The resulting friendship makes the show pass the Bechdel test so hard it skews the entire curve eastward.
No character is left undeveloped — even those of whom it would be easy to make caricatures are human. Even Joel, who’s a complete scumbag at the start, is humanized. The acting is so fabulous that I find myself thinking of the characters as if the actors have completely disappeared.
Perhaps the best part of Mrs. Maisel is that it is applicable — not only to our troubled political present, but to anyone who wants to expand beyond the limits placed, societally or personally, upon their lives. Midge is going to try and fail and shiver from her own perceived inadequacy before she can even make it past her own front door. And as someone who also wants to make it, to try and fail and shiver, I’m so lost in her story that I can’t tell where it ends and this one begins.