The beginning of the end of ‘The wonderful Mrs. Maisel’: the first episodes surprise looking to the future

Season 5 of ‘The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’ marks the end of an era for Amazon Prime Video, which has long had this series as its flagship. The comedy created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino reaches its final episodes alongside Midge Maisel (played by Rachel Brosnahan), who continues to struggle to make it as a comedian and stand-up stand-up in 1950s and 1960s New York.

With the final season we take a look not only at the story where we left off last year (this is how the finale of ‘The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’ season 4 ended), but also at a distant future that finally answers the questions most awaited by fans in the face of the bittersweet farewell to the series. The first three episodes are available starting this Friday, April 14, and we’ll see if the finale meets or exceeds our expectations.

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The new era of Mrs. Maisel, comedian and… screenwriter

Season 4 saw Midge cornered as a strip club emcee after the latest blow to her professional career, and determined to set her own standards and limits on her path to success. As Lenny Bruce tells her in an incredible scene at the end of the previous season, she has to cut the bullshit and work on whatever. In season 5, the feeling of despondency continues. “It’s like taking two steps forward and three steps back, I’m tired”, the protagonist tells her manager Susie (Alex Borstein), and she is right. Even so, you have to reinvent yourself to succeed.

In the new episodes, we will see Midge taking a job as a writer on the Gordon Ford show, a type of late night jimmy kimmel style who suddenly sees interest in having his first female screenwriter. It is not what the protagonist wants to do with her life, but it is the gateway to new contacts that could take her far. All stone fa paret. Her complex relationship with the show’s host and star, Gordon Ford himself (played by Reid Scott), becomes one of the mainstays of the new episodes.

At the same time, we meet again with the usual suspects: Susie pushes ahead with her management firm scouting 360 talent, Abe (Tony Shalhoub) continues her newspaper articles, Rose (Marin Hinkle) deals with the results of her outright war with New York matchmakers, and Joel (Michael Zegen) receives an emotional blow when Mei (Stephanie Hsu, Oscar nominee for ‘Everything At Once Everywhere’) bets on her professional life over her sentimental one.

In this season we will also see Sylvio (Milo Ventimiglia) back, who will try to offer explanations to Midge in a chase through the New York subway, and of course, although not as much as we would like, Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby), that in the previous season he finally resolved the sexual tension he had accumulated with the protagonist.

In Season 5, Mrs. Maisel looks to the future too soon.

Undoubtedly, the most surprising thing about the season is the alternation between the “present” that we know (1960s) and the future that we see in small segments (1980s), with Midge’s children grown up and his status as a comedy legend completely cemented in the popular imagination. These moments flash forward we see them from the first episode of season 5, and they are as curious as they are unsatisfying.

Yes, the new episodes taste like goodbye and that’s inevitable, but suddenly jumping into the future when Midge is still in the bottom rung of her career in the present of the show’s timeline… It’s weird. It feels like we’ve taken a hasty leap, we’ve moved on before we get to enjoy the moment we’ve been waiting for six years, and suddenly we’re presented with the result without ever having had a chance to feel emotion about the process.. And the truth is that perhaps the Palladinos needed something like this because Midge’s journey has lost its way and they are a little short of new ideas.

This new detail from ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ season 5 is just the beginning of the many quirks the creators pull off in these episodes, and they don’t really help give the characters a sense of denouement. In the end, Thinking back to the first episode of the series, in which Midge Maisel takes the stage at the Gaslight Café to discover her calling (and showing off her tits, in the process), we wonder: how much has the character grown since then? What has he learned? What has he got? The answers to those questions say a lot, and the feeling he leaves is one of missed opportunities, even though his delirious and lightning-quick style hasn’t aged a day and continues to convince us.

Thus, fans of the series can enjoy for the last time the successes that brought ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ to the top of the series world (all of that is still there, don’t worry) and at the same time accept with resignation that many things we wanted to see will never happen.

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