The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

i think this is the final season.

oh I guess there is one more

The clothes, the buttons, the chairs, the lamps. I almost missed the point of the very important conversation between Mae and Joel because I was trying to work out how I could get their dining table light fitting. That aubergine colour that Abe and Rose both wear. Their kitchen phone. And then poor Lenny on his way to LA. It's all too much.

so excited to watch the new eps!

i rewatched s4 last week & cried in so many parts, i had forgotten so many key moments!

so many great Abe moments but my favorite was when the woman had her hand on Abe’s thigh
Waiter: How are you liking it?
Abe, stricken: Liking WHAT!?

Meet my new friends...
Whatshisface and... Whatsherface...
They come from... Somewhere
And they're out tonight to celebrate... Something

#Frostcrotch

i also enjoyed Moishe/Kevin Pollak heckling Midge’s set at the Button Club for the sheer meta delight of it

Just started episode 2 of the new season, and...I feel like it's getting away (or has already gotten away from) the writers. It's predictable in ways that previous seasons weren't, and leaning into this Forrest Gump shit about "I got muddy at Woodstock!" and being involved with Quincy Jones and Paul Simon, and performing with Bob Hope in Vietnam feels extremely hacky. Also, souvenir concert t-shirts were not a thing in 1969. No one would have made a "Midge Maisel College Tour 1969" shirt with the tour dates on the back.

But at least the drum hardware and other music gear is period-correct, so it's got that going for it. I'll keep watching till the end, in part because I enjoy the performances, and I wanna see how other plot lines shake out, but yeesh.

I'm behind on this show, mostly because shows in which the lead character constantly gets in their own way in colossally destructive ways (like the Shy Baldwin incident) actually causes me anxiety to watch, which is why I've delayed starting this season. but I'll get over it and eventually catch up - that's my thing, and not the show's fault.

my folks have it on constantly, so the scene I did see from this year was pretty hilarious (the airport scene - "the flight is not cancelled, they cancelled US!").

But at least the drum hardware and other music gear is period-correct, so it's got that going for it.

Scratch that. OK, yes, technically a Vox AC30 is period-correct...but it's monumentally unlikely that a bathhouse in New York would go through the trouble of having one imported from the UK in 1961. It would be prohibitively expensive to the point that the cost would be twice that of a comparable Fender amp that could be purchased within a few blocks of said bathhouse.

(I probably should have posted this in the IA thread instead of here. Season is actually decent so far.)

Only 2 eps in but this second flash forward is a lot much.

Oh, this episode annoyed me. I mean, it was fine and all, Suzy's stuff was good, but the whole jacket/piracy business was irritating even by the standards of this show.

Plus I've realized that I'm becoming obsessed with how time works on television programmes. The whole time I was watching Midge and Joel on the fire escape, and it was getting dark out, I was thinking "don't you have a gig on a boat at 7pm? What time is it now? Isn't this the summer? Are the buildings that tall that the sun is completely gone by 6pm?"

Very satisfying ending, well done everyone.

agree!! I got kind of emotional towards the end with the Gordon Ford stuff

that last scene was so weird and YET perfect? just a lovely way to go out.

sidebar: Amy Sherman-Palladino is on Maron this week & it’s a great conversation!
Even the stuff about her parents, i could listen to her talk about them for hours

Oh, good to know.

that last scene was so weird and YET perfect? just a lovely way to go out.

Yeah, husband pointed out that they did a lovely bait and switch -- they set you up to think she's isolated and all alone, but she isn't. And I liked that they didn't over do the Lenny scenes. No need to when people can just Google. Overall I liked that this whole season was a long wrap-up, with no one episode having to carry all the "here's where everybody ended up" stuff. And it's a good sign when I have that little tingle at the end of aw, don't go, you guys.

Selfishly I wanted more Lenny; but the way they handled it was respectful to his legacy & his family. To spend more time with him would have been to see how far adrift he really was then, which the SF standup gig did a good job of giving a snapshot of that; and truthfully to spend more time at that point in his life would inevitably = using & it’s not that kind of show

Please tell me where i can buy suzy’s gold clogs!

Oh … and Suzy’s scene in the automat where she talks more about Heddy? … give Borstein every award, she’s so goddamn good. The sheer pain in her eyes KILLED me. And her line to Midge, were you ever a blonde? Perfect without putting a bow on it.

It's very funny listening to Amy Sherman Palladino and Alex Borstein (separately) explaining to Marc Maron that women find Luke Kirby really attractive and charming. He is so unaware of it.

I've been convinced from early on that Lenny's death would be a pivotal moment on the show but I guess it's true that might've been too dark for them.

OTOH, I thought that Joel getting his ass absolutely wrecked by Chinese gamblers was weirdly off tone with the rest of the show in terms of it's sheer brutality. Mei's departure was also very abrupt to the point where I wondered if it was handled that way due to other obligations Stephanie Hsu had after her big role in a multi oscar winning film.

It was interesting to see how the characters' lives turned out, although the flash forwards sometimes felt like we were stepping into another universe.

The thing I liked most about the finale was how Midge's big breakthrough set was a summary and summing up of the entire series while still feeling funny and triumphant. I also found it funny that it was absolutely Joel's peak: he got to cheer on Midge and see her be a success while dispatching his parents to Florida at the same time.

the flash forwards & backwards this season, and this final episode especially started to give me vertigo! lol like i started to forget what timeperiod the bulk of the series was set

Also, that was the longest 4 minutes ever.

I thought/hoped more of the loose ends would be tied up. This season gave more time and attention to the kids, but they're forgotten by the end (and maybe that bit in Midge's set on Gordon's show was something of a meta joke). In a way, it makes sense: the kids had no character development and very little screen time, and shoehorning in decades of their backstory at the end would've been cumbersome at best. I thought the ending mostly worked; I'm not sure how else it could have ended. And while I was happy with her triumphant TV appearance, the reception to it by the audience, the band, and Ford was so over-the-top that I thought it might end up being a dream or a hallucination.

The neglect of the kids has been a running gag since the first season.

The neglect of the kids by their parents? Sure, that was a running gag. The neglect of the kids by the writers? Eh, I don't think that became a gag until this season. I always got the impression that the writers wished they'd never written kids into the story, but had no way of plausibly (or easily) writing them out of the show. And as soon as they started to flesh out who the kids were -- the flash-forwards at the beginning of this season -- they dropped it.

Kevin Pollak has a Maisel podcast w cast members etc, it’s v good!

It’s called My Mrs Maisel Pod

in other sort of related news

i was talking to my friend’s mother about Mrs Maisel because we both love the show. She is a wonderful 80-year woman who grew up in Brooklyn. I was laughing with her about Miriam’s bedtime routine in the first episode, going to bed & waking up in full makeup etc & no shit, she said that she did the EXACT same thing. Her husband never saw her without makeup! She even puts on mascara when she gets up in the morning because she hates looking at her face in the mirror without it. Incredible.

Way late on this, we just started watching this a few weeks ago and we're about 2/3rds through Season 2. Really enjoying this so far, much more than I expected to - the description way upthread (haven't read much further than the first handful of posts) of a musical without songs is pretty otm.

My wife and son are also in the midst of a Gilmore Girls binge, so the similarities between the shows feel a little more glaring in that context.

I watched Down With Love over the weekend and it gave a strong Maisel vibe.

Down with Love is a little gem.

sitting through the final episode

as always, the question i have is how can a show and a star be so, so funny and sharp and well written until the stand up scene each episode which is as flat and weighty and awkward as anything youll see

like how the worst part of every mad men was the fucking ad pitch

in fact i blame.sex and the city

There's a fundamental problem there, right, because in universe Midge is hilarious and as with a show where there's a song or a movie everyone finds amazing that already raises expectations in an unhelpful way. But also they seem to have no idea how stand-up actually works, she's constantly doing "off the cuff material I just came up with" and killing with it.

I don't know if I'd call the last season sharp and well written tho, I enjoyed it but mostly due to a combination of actor's charmingness + gorgeous setpieces + period popcult porn. Final scene worked tho.

The acting is bad in the stand up routines, not just the writing. She’s delivering it like a monologue, not standup. Her accent is dire, too.

maybe its an entire meta comment on the "my friend is incredibly funny go see their stand up"

I don't think it explains or forgives the stand up scenes for not being great, but fwiw Amy Sherman-Palladino was talking on Maron's podcast about how it was an intentional choice for Midge's act to not sound at all like a stand-up act from that era.