Plunging yourself into a show created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, and then executive produced by her and her collaborator/husband Daniel is one of life’s truly great pleasures.
Happy to pack a thousand words in where most people speak a hundred, shows like the Gilmore Girls, Bunheads, and currently The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are a riotously enveloping cascade of vibrantly clever wordplay, mischievous surreality mixed with human foibles and characters so richly and fulsomely realised they leap off the screen, seemingly appearing in glorious 3D before you.
The point is, that there’s a LOT going on and most of it, far more than any of their peers in similar-sized productions, is consistently, wondrously and immersively good and you are so taken into their created worlds, rich as they are with the comedically vivacious things that make us human, that it quickly becomes impossible to pull yourself back to reality.
And that’s even when things are getting tough for the characters you grow to know and love and situations that feel quirkily, happily heightened and yet affectingly grounded and real all at once.
In the third season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel we are treated to Miriam aka Midge’s (Rachel Brosnahan) career on the deliriously thrilling up-and-up, her engagement to Benjamin (Zachary Levi) in the rearview mirror, her children all but permanently in the car of ex-then-not-ex-then-soon-to-be-ex Joel (Michael Zegen) who’s opening a club and falling in love with the mysteriously sassy Mei Lin (Stephanie Hsu) and parents, Abe and Rose (Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle) struggling to cope with radically changing personal circumsntances.
It’s fantastically frenetic but then that’s typical of a Sherman-Palladino production which always bits off more than you might think it can chew and makes a real, wholly satisfying meal of it.
It also creates time and place in gloriously lush detail.
All of the episodes show Midge, with manager Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein), on tour, or rarely home from tour, with super famous and troubled singer Shy Baldwin (LeRoy McClain), a man fighting off more than a few demons (though alas, some are draped in demonic clothes through societal attitudes, not any failing on Baldwin’s part) but who promises to elevate her career way past the smalltime clubs of the past and into the stratospheric realms of true celebrity.
It looks like Miriam can’t lose with ———- SPOILERS ALERT !!!!! ———- with money pouring in, a chance to buy her old apartment back in her own name and the realisation of the kind of success she has tenaciously chased since that first lifechanging episode in season one.
This is her moment, or lots of richly dressed moments, and Miriam is having the time of her life for the most part and honestly there seems to be no way any of this could go wrong.
Until, of course, it does and in a fashion which shocks Miriam, manager Susie, whose up to her neck in a gambling addiction, which has seen her lose all the money she and Miriam have earned, and up for, if anyone digs down, for arson and fraud.
They rise so high and then they fall and by season’s end, all of the gloss is well and truly off the nascent shining rise-and-rise of Miriam’s career as that rarest of things in the 1960s – a female comic.
Season three does have a lot of fun while it can though with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel doing everything it does best from rapid-fire wordplay which feels like a witty dictionary loaded into a dialogue machine gun and fired, evocative realisation of the 1960s including a trademark love of fashion, and the early whisperings of the revolutionary zeal of the era which even ropes into Abe (who’s delighted) and Rose (who’s not, accusing Miriam at one point, of infecting her with rebelliousness) and characters advancing in ways big and small that brings this sprawling ensemble world to thrillingly fun, and at times, affecting life.
While season three does a little of a placeholder/linking feel of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back to it, with Miriam neither back in the dingy clubs of yore nor yet a household name, there’s still a manic lot of things going on and a sense that things are happening and are going to keep happening and happening because surely Miriam is the kind of person to whom good things always happen?
Well, you could be forgiven for getting that impression with the titular protagonist gamely staring convention and expectation, not just societally as a whole but within her warm and cosy but sometimes judgmental New York Jewish community, and surmounting obstacles with a smile on her face, chutzpah in her heart and dizzyingly blizzardy wordplay packed into every sentence.
For all the success at hand, and it’s there in the period piece hotels, the bustling streets and the riotous trappings of success, what begins to trouble The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel this season is that no success comes without some fairly significant costs.
No one wants to believe that because when that brass ring dangles, who’s wants to even entertain the idea that there are sink-enhancing lead weights dangling from it?
No one that’s who so neither Miriam, who makes a serious but well-intentioned error of judgement in her appearance at the legendary Apollo theatre when she inadvertently ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- outs Shy Baldwin (the audience doesn’t pick up on this but the singer does and good things do not ensue) nor Susie who’s struggling with the narcissistically destructive Sophie Lennon (Jane Lynch), whom she also manages, and her gambling problems, see some a terrible thing coming which it does at the end of season three on a darkened airport runway where all of Miriam’s dreams seem to die.
As cliffhangers go, it’s a doozy and then some, a dark cloud of epically black proportions that arrives in the wake of small troubling things here and there, evidence that while The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is often light, bright, funny and fabulously coutured, it is also laced with darkness and human fallibility, all of which add up to a show which is far more emotionally substantial and weightier in its arch social commentary that it might otherwise appear its fetching clothes of vibrant comedy, sparkling wordplay and fun character interplay, and which promises a great deal of searching and dark times of the human heart when it resumes in season four.