The Pitch: When we last saw the titular character in Amy Sherman-Palladino’s Amazon Prime comedy, things were looking quite bad for her. Despite killing at The Apollo, Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) has been fired from Shy Baldwin’s tour, thanks to some jokes that alluded a bit too closely to his status as a closeted gay man.
This left her abandoned on the tarmac with Susie (Alex Borstein), who, unbeknownst to Midge, had lost all of Midge’s hard-earned money thanks to a combination of gambling problems and general managerial irresponsibility.
Meet Me on the West Side: Season 4 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel picks up shortly after these events in a familiar setting — Midge, onstage, cigarette in hand, seemingly killing at a club in The Village. The cliffhanger of Season 3 seemed to indicate that this next era would push Midge and co. into the show’s most uncomfortable territory yet, and maybe even have its central character face some real consequences.
Unfortunately, the first two episodes of the new season don’t indicate the reckoning many may have hoped for Midge. Instead, the dialogue leans into some surface-level Girl Power energy — it’s just her and Susie (and the safety net of a loving family and a still loving ex-not-ex-ex-again-husband) against the world, in case we forgot.
It was genuinely interesting exploring a single, Jewish woman’s struggle to exist in the late-1950s entertainment world alongside a gay Black man. All that nuance is erased when Midge decides that what happened to her was unfair, or just another example of a man ruining her life, a claim that is never countered by anyone around her or the show itself.
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Tagged: Alex Borstein, Alternative Music, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Comedy, FEATURES, music blog, Rachel Brosnahan, Reviews, Streaming, Tony Shalhoub, TV