Through its first four seasons, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel kept an increasing number of plates spinning at a speed that could leave you at once in disbelief and laughter, and always felt on the brink of losing sight of its main story and character. The fifth and final season of the Amazon dramedy is a course correction of sorts, paring back the clamorous side plots that had started taking up too much of the show’s oxygen while retaining its electric spirit.
After his triumphant 1961 Carnegie Hall show in last season’s finale, Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby), Mrs. Maisel’s quasi-spiritual muse, angrily confronted Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), challenging her not to see his myriad controversies and arrests as something to emulate. Seeming to take his advice to heart, Midge attempts to sand down some of the edges of her act in season five and lands a plum gig that, naturally, she nearly sabotages through her impatience and relentless questioning of the status quo.
The entire season finds Midge stuck in the age-old bind of professional women. Keeping her head down and waiting for her “turn”—a recurring phrase this season that highlights how a system of privilege pits oppressed groups against one another—practically ensures that she’ll be ignored. But insisting to be heard and fighting for what she deserves could lead to getting blacklisted in a very small, very petty, and very backward-looking industry.
As in previous seasons, series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino keeps Midge and her manager, Susie (Alex Borstein), careening from surprise success to inexplicable catastrophe. Their relationship remains the heart of the show, their ups and downs as volatile as anything between Midge and Bruce or Midge’s doting ex-husband, Joel (Michael Zegen).
Forgiveness is a central theme that’s threaded throughout the final season, with grudges and growing resentments driving more of the plot than ever before. The inherent tension between Midge and Susie homes in on how these very different women—Midge, the sharp-dressed Upper West Side gal, and Susie, the scrappy go-getter described in one scene as “dressing like a Katzenjammer kid”—share not just a love of working blue, but insatiable appetites for achievement and acceptance. Though both women are outsiders looking for a way into an industry that spurns them, issues of trust slowly chip away at their bond.
In an achingly poignant monologue in the penultimate episode of the show’s final season, “The Princess and the Plea,” Abe (Tony Shalhoub), comes to the tragic realization that he never really took his daughter—or her ambition—seriously because she was a woman. Abe is a man driven by his impatience and discontent over the seemingly trivial, though thanks to Sherman-Palladino’s knack for screwball comedy, most of it is pitched to chaotic hilarity. Abe spends another episode, “Typos and Torsos,” agonizing over having misspelled Carol Channing’s name in a Village Voice article, while Midge’s mother, Rose (Marin Hinkle), worries that every accident that befalls her is the work of the mafia-like matchmaker cabal that she upset last season.
But while its pacing remains breathlessly intact, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel looks to be wrapping up on a gloomier note than it began on. Its mixture of comedy and fantastical nostalgia is still an intoxicating as ever, and its characters’ rat-a-tat dialogue and cheerful boozing, not to mention the show’s impressive period design, all suggest Mad Men as a zany Broadway farce. But at the same time, the cost of success is more glaringly apparent than ever, as Susie’s mobster colleagues become less Guys and Dolls-style comic relief and more, well, mobster, and Midge’s power brokering becomes increasingly desperate as she feels her time is running out.
Ever since Midge first took the stage at the Gaslight Cafe in the show’s pilot episode, she’s been aiming for what feels like a pipe dream in the era of chauvinism. It’s only in the final season, though, that the limitations of her still-awe-inspiring ambition become crystalized. Early in the season, Joel’s fiancé, Mei (Stephanie Hsu), tells him, “I can’t have it all!” and Midge likewise begins to realize that having both a successful career and a family might be more than she bargained for. The world of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel may be fantastical, but it’s never so unrealistic as to pretend that its heroine can really have it all.
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