TV #11 of 2022:
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, season 4
This mid-century comedy continues to shine in its lavish period trimmings and signature Amy Sherman-Palladino banter, but the series has lost all sense of its protagonist’s motivation or personal storyline at this point. She’s determined to be a standup comic but is refusing all opening gigs, even ones that would do obvious wonders for her career. She is struggling to pay her bills, but haughtily rejects an offer of $12,000 — over $115,000 in today’s dollars! — to agree not to talk about something she doesn’t want to talk about anyway. There’s of course dramatic potential in such stubbornness, and heroes are allowed to be imperfect, but this feels more like an arbitrary writing decision than anything arising naturally from the character. When folks like Susie or Lenny call her out on her behavior, she doesn’t really have an answer for their exasperation.
The show’s grasp on a recognizable reality is slipping, too. This season Midge works as an emcee at an illegal strip club where each act has more outrageous production quality and absurd theming than the last, which… I guess is a running joke? But it’s a weird departure for a prestige program that’s been generally grounded until now. The jumping-the-shark moment is probably when the heroine’s mother Rose is hypnotized on stage and compelled to repeat the routine she saw her daughter give some time ago — which she somehow does word for word, with expert delivery. There’s other strangeness too, like Susie’s discovery of that magician drunk in a bar or her general overnight success as a manager, which doesn’t seem to fit with the painstaking grind of previous years.
The majority of these elements could have more or less worked with a degree of tweaking, and the title is still nailing most of its individual scenes, though the screwy subplots tend to follow peripheral characters for much longer than necessary. It remains fun to recognize aspects of Jewish life portrayed on-screen, despite the gentile actors (and their problematic defense of their own casting in various interviews). I’m not ready to quit watching or even rate this outing lower than an enjoyably flawed three-out-of-five stars, but it’s squandering a lot of my invested good will from the early days.
[Content warning for antisemitism and racism including slurs.]
★★★☆☆
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