And the final curtain arrives. Or at least the last performance for Midge. Amazon Prime Video premieres this Friday season 5 of ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ and, from minute one, it is quite noticeable that it is the farewell for a comedy that was at the top and that, although it has lost some fame, has remained among the most relevant on television today.
Already if, Amy Sherman-Palladino and company begin the season by jumping twenty years into the future. At eighty, where we meet the not so little Esther Maisel visiting the psychologist. After the prologue, we flash back in time… right into the morning after last season’s finale, with Midge coming home completely frozen and epiphany on her mind.
days of future past
In this way, the first episodes of this final season of ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ (server has seen the first five) give us some hints of the future of the comic played by Rachel Brosnahan. Yes, I achieved a prominent fame but also in the eighties, it is in the doldrums. We are seeing these brushstrokes while, in the present, we see her dealing with working as a screenwriter in the The Gordon Ford Show.
Notice that after so many years watching ‘Gilmore Girls’, ‘Bunheads’ and so many seasons of this and one of the things that continues to surprise me about the series is that so many things happen in each episode. Although they all revolve around a specific conflict, the little more than fifty minutes per episode are full of experiences and occurrences of each of the family members.
In this sense, although Midge is still in the center, the trend of giving enough space to the incidents of the environment has continued: from a certain descent into hell of a Joel (Michael Zegen) whose fiancée has decided to leave to the surreal plot of war that the matchmakers’ guild seems to have declared on Rose (Marin Hinke).
But, as it is good to reiterate, the central plot is still in the comic and its attempt to have his great opportunity in the show business. This will include great performances and musical numbers that rival the “Garbage Man Can” from ‘The Simpsons’. This and the complex relationships that our protagonist has with both men and Susie (Alex Borstein).
A stronger season
I think in this season 5 ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ regains a certain pulsedue in large part because having an ending in mind allowed them not to have as much drift as in that kind of existential “reset” of season 4. Knowing how it is going to end allows not only better direction but also to solidify the plots .
In that sense, if one looks back, actually the biggest problems we can have when appreciating ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ lie in the fact that they are their own hallmarks and that optimistic spirit and idealization that, in some way, put a stop to the evolution of the series, its characters and its plots. Not so much in a negative sense, but in some restrictive way.
It’s not so much that the series repeats itself, It is subject to certain parameters. that cause a certain wear more for the viewer than for the fiction itself, which continues to work tremendously well but its “magic” or “charm” factor no longer impacts as much as in the first seasons.
Which does not prevent us from enjoying ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’. The final season of the comedy is a great sendoff: It’s funny, slightly absurd, wonderfully directed and, above all, welcoming. While her days as award-winning and critical darlings seem to be over, Midge and company will be sorely missed.