Alright, here it is folks, the moment maybe some, maybe none of you have been waiting for: my thoughts on the The Marvellous Mrs Maisel final season. I did it, I finally got it done. I think the reason it took me so long, aside from previously mentioned mental health issues, is that writing stuff like this for five hundred and sixteen minutes of television is hard! It’s really hard. I would love to hear what you all think of this, and if you want to discuss what I’ve written here, or even just about the show or season in general, please hit me up! I would love to talk about it with you.
Now enough with the delays and the stalling - please enjoy my review (??) of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel season 5, the final season.
So, I really liked the first few seasons of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. Even though it’s a bit cheesy and dopey at times. Rachel Brosnahan is a joy to watch on-screen, and a lot of the other actors here do a really great job with the script they were given... such as it is. On a recent rewatch, though, I started to see the strings a little bit - things that I liked the first time around just didn’t quite hit the same. I got through most of it, all the important parts, and then I started the new season. It’s been a couple weeks or so since I finished it, and I’m not as down on it now as I was when I started, but y’all, I am about to have some opinions.
This the final Mrs Maisel season really feels like creator Amy Sherman-Palladino probably wanted to do at least one more season after this, but someone at Jeff’s Website Studios said no, so she simply decided to burn the show to the ground.
Now as I wrote in the subtitle, I am about to spoil things here, so this is your final warning: if you don’t want to be spoiled for season five of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, get out now.
Also: foul language ahead! 🤬
The entire point of this season seems to be leaning into how much of a piece of shit Miriam Weissman is. We get glimpses of her in “current day” 1962 juxtaposed with scenes set in 1972 and 1982, and a couple of other random years, where we skip around and see all sorts of wild stuff - Midge is rich and famous, her kids Ethan and Esther are all grown up, Joel is in prison, and there are some bonkers and hilariously bad facial prosthetics.
Now, aside from the hilariously stupid idea that Midge as a stand-up comic somehow got insanely rich, there are some cool ideas here. The first episode opens with Esther in a psychiatrists office in 1981, searching through a backpack for something and seeming very annoyed. On first watch, I didn’t like that this is something that’s shown at all, but the more I thought about it the more I warmed to the idea. In previous seasons, The Marvellous Mrs Maisel has at times made a point of showing Midge being a terrible and/or absent mother, usually for comedic effect, but I think it’s interesting that they took this idea and bore it out, to show that mid-20’s Midge’s actions had consequences. In a later episode we also see Ethan as an adult, with Midge annoyingly landing in a helicopter nearby and upsetting everyone - this wasn’t as interesting to me, but it was still a good glimpse into how little regard Midge appears to have for anyone but herself, Joel, Susie, or Lenny Bruce.
Speaking of Lenny Bruce, I want to talk about his appearances in the final season. If you know anything about him from real life, you might know how his life ended, and where. The very first episode of season five has Midge bumping into him randomly at the airport when he is about to board a plane to Los Angeles. This made me so. Fucking. Mad. IRL Lenny Bruce was found dead in his home in Hollywood Hills in 1966, which lead me to believe that the very last time Midge will ever see him was this scene at the airport. Midge walks away from the interaction with Lenny with a strange look on her face, as if she somehow knows that this will be the last time she ever sees him alive, and it is my humble opinion that that fucking sucks. Lenny Bruce is one of the best characters on this show, with a ton of great appearances and lines and jokes, and Luke Kirby does a phenomenal job of capturing the real Lenny’s energy - it’s not 1:1, but it’s a great depiction, and I simply cannot believe Amy S-P would do my boy like this. The only other time we see Lenny in this season is years later, performing in front of a fairly disinterested crowd as he mumbles and rambles about this thing and that, and it’s so fucking depressing. This season, the show never outright mentions his drug use, but it’s heavily implied, and there’s a moment in a back room where he is talking to Susie and appears to be unable to stand up. On the one hand, I’m kind of pleased that they didn’t depict his death at all, but it really bothered me that these two scenes were all we got of him before the show stops referencing him at all.
The part of this season that really shines the most to me is a scene from episode eight, with Abe in a dimly-lit restaurant with Gabe, his boss, and a couple of colleagues. The scene begins with Abe checking his coat and coming over to sit where Gabe etcetera are already seated around a table and chatting. They order some wine. There’s a cut here to a few minutes later where the wine has arrived and been poured, and Abe sits silently, swirling his drink and clearly deep in thought while the others talk amongst themselves. Eventually, Gabe interrupts Abe’s thoughts, telling him that he had been raving to the others about his conversational skills. Abe apologises. “It’s just… the whole goddamn world, you know,” he says, clearly depressed about something. “Only that?” chimes in one of the other men at the table. Then ensues a conversation about the state of the world, about progress, about gender inequality and mental health, even, which was surprising to me. This scene is heartbreaking, and might be some of the best writing in the entire series. I cried watching this scene the first time around, and again just now rewatching it. It’s really sad that Abe never got the kind of character development shown here earlier, I would have liked to see that.
Episode six is an interesting sort of experiment; beginning with Midge on stage, in 1985, talking about her relationship with Susie, it then transitions into a roast for an indifferent and grumpy Susie in 1990, which is basically a device for a bunch of famous people you’ve seen in other things to come together as characters never seen before or again and tell stories about Susie’s rise to fame as one of the biggest talent managers in the United States. Here we get an explanation for why Joel is in prison, and a bunch of seemingly randomly selected stories about what Susie has been up to since 1962. As with the portrayal of Esther in episode one, this was another thing about this season that really bothered me at first, because it felt like it lacks focus, but as I thought about it more, it started to grow on me. This collection of tales about Susie’s exploits make sense for her character, and help to define who she is.
Overall, this season really fell down for me when I realised that a lot of really interesting moments never truly pay off. We jump around a lot between different years and perspectives, and we see a lot of things that could have been great story arcs, but they simply end and are never mentioned again. I really do feel like this season was supposed to be two or more, and Jeff’s Studio said no, so Amy Sherman-Palladino lit it all on fire. I think that if hyou like this show, it might still be worth it to catch the final season, but personally I feel like it should never have been made - at least not in this form. I would much rather have seen this stretched out more, over at least one more season. It tries to give the viewer some closure in the very last scene of the very last episode, but for me it falls flat. I don’t think I’ll ever watch this again.
Thanks so much for reading! What did you think? Once again, please feel free to hit me up in the comments, on the socials, or send me an email. And as always, if you want to read more stuff by me, you can check out my Letterboxd reviews - I recently reviewed The Craft (1996), Eradication (2022), and The Sand (2015)!
I hope y’all are staying safe out there! Have a great week and I’ll talk to you again soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚
Links | Twitter | Mastodon | Cohost | Substack | itch.io | Letterboxd | Instagram | Carrd | Email
