#coffeeandabook

I stared at this for a second trying to figure out what show has a Greg AND a Benjamin situation right now because that’s how perceptive I am today. BUT YES! So much stress, about both those situations, on their own separate tv shows.

I’m still trying to figure out how I feel. With Benjamin I think I mostly feel … unsatisfied? Like, I was enjoying him and seeing them be together and seeing Midge experiment with being with someone new, and him being so tall. I like that he’s quirky, but not quirky in the specific ways where he’d end up competing with her quirkiness. I love that he’s so accepting and supportive of her. And then all the sudden they wanted to get engaged! It just seemed so quick, like they barely knew each other. Was she still wearing her wedding ring at that point? Did she ever get around to getting a divorce? You’d think that would have come up in Abe’s ginormous background check (or possibly I missed it; I watched them so quickly, I need to do a rewatch). 

I don’t know if I want them together, I just want MORE. This show could stand to slow down a bit, or give us more substantive scenes in place of so many pretty montages and musical numbers. What do we even know about Benjamin? He’s tall, so tall, and so classically handsome it’s easy to overlook how little we know. He likes Midge, so he has good taste presumably. He’s a doctor, and a collector of weird art. (And weird girls, possibly? This is probably unfair, because I like Benjamin, and he seems to genuinely enjoy Midge, but the thought crossed my mind that he is not a guy who collects art for deep, meaningful reasons. He collects it because no one else has it. And why does he want Midge, exactly? Well, there’s certainly no one else like her!)

And I have no idea how Midge feels about him. She likes him, obviously. How could she not, he’s friggin’ adorable. But it also seems like she’s trying to recreate her old, secure life with him, the one that fits in on the Upper West Side and gets her parents’ approval. Instead of introspection about what would make this marriage work where the other one hadn’t, she was looking for her parents’ approval. In the meantime, she leads Benjamin to believe she wakes up looking perfect every morning, setting herself up for the same kind of superficial, outwardly perfect marriage she had with Joel. (It blew my mind in the Season 1 finale when I realized Joel had never seen what Midge really looks like when she wakes up. How could he NOT have had an insecure breakdown in that relationship? There was no room to be a human being, to be vulnerable, to god forbid, fail at something, when she never even wakes up with morning breath.)

On the plus side, Benjamin knows and doesn’t mind she’s a comedian, check. But did they talk about what that would mean for them? Did he see this a cute little hobby, or an actual career path for her that he would respect and support? Would there be more kids, and who would take care of them? What really frustrates me is that we never saw her have the conversation after she agreed to the tour about what that would mean for them. It seemed like she never gave him the chance to be okay with a sort of part-time marriage (and he might have been, given what he said to Suzy about Midge being a star; wouldn’t at least one of them have thought through the ramifications of this?). I don’t know how Midge came to the conclusion that marriage to Benjamin and going on a tour were incompatible. I don’t like that the show set up a false dichotomy, that a woman can have the dream career, or the relationship, but not both. It seems like the more salient point is that Benjamin didn’t even enter her mind during that fateful phone call, because she’s probably not in love with him (sigh). I suppose she’s entitled to a rebound, but I feel sad for Benjamin, and sad we didn’t see more of their relationship (or even its end) on screen. And now I take back the mean thing I said about him being an art collector. It took him SO LONG to find her! Sigh.