Spoilers for Season 5 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are ahead, including the series finale. If you haven’t watched the acclaimed show on the 2023 TV schedule, you can stream the entire series with an Amazon Prime subscription.
One of the reasons I’d consider The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel not only one of Amazon Primes' best shows, but one of the best series in general, is the candid, hilarious and turbulent story of Midge Maisel finding her independence. As Rachel Brosnahan’s titular character works her tail off to become the next great stand-up comedian, we see her thrive, falter and ultimately overcome all the challenges put in front of her. And through this empowering story that is driven by snappy dialogue, bright outfits and a quick-witted gal, we got what I would consider the perfect story of a woman finding her independence.
The Series Doesn’t Downplay How Tough It Is To Make It As A Woman In Any Industry, Really
When we see Midge Maisel in her older age during Season 5, it becomes abundantly clear that she became one of the most successful stand-up comedians of her generation, which is a stark contrast to how our protagonist's career is going throughout the majority of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
In Season 5 alone we see how the implicit bias of the 1960s deeply impacts Midge’s career. When she starts working at The Gordon Ford Show, she’s referred to as the girl writer. She has to reject Gordon’s romantic advances multiple times even though he’s her boss. When she goes to what’s basically an audition for a slot on the Jack Paar show she’s the only woman there and gets rejected. She also calls her fellow writers out for constantly berating her when she needed to go home and take care of a personal matter, noting that she has kids and elderly parents, and this is just in the newest season. This kind of treatment is also present throughout the series, and Midge never backs down from the challenge, and is always working to fight against the gender norms of the time.
She says something in her final stand-up set of the show that really sat with me about the meaning of independence and the connotation it held for women of the time. She said:
I do know that because of my situation, my daughter's going to grow up different than I did. She's going to be tougher, more independent. That's a terrifying word. Independent, especially for women. It was not a word we were supposed to be familiar with. I wasn't, my mother wasn't, but I'm on my own now.
Over the course of five seasons, Midge has been swimming upstream, not just because it’s hard no matter who you are to make it in comedy, but because it’s even tougher to make it when you're a woman. Mrs. Maisel has to deal with constant misogyny from colleagues, her parents (who are not accepting of her career for the majority of the series), trying to balance being a working woman, a stand-up comedian and a mother, and the show handles all these topics with grace and humor.
In the end, one of the reasons Midge’s success is so satisfying is because we saw all the adversity she faced to get to that point, and how she ultimately overcame it by never backing down, and never losing sight of who she was.
Midge Isn’t Perfect, And That’s Why I Love Her Story
Midge messes up a lot. In Season 1, Episode 1 she gets arrested for taking her top off on stage. Throughout Season 4 she refuses to be an opening act for anyone, which leads to her losing the best opportunity of her career. She’s really not that attentive when it comes to her kids. She’s fallible like the rest of us, and it’s the bumps in the road she has to jump over, whether they be self-inflicted or systemic that make her stronger, and help propel her to becoming a truly independent woman.
While Rachel Brosnahan’s character is incredibly independent from the get-go, the more she works toward her goal of being a successful comedian she goes from self-driven to self-sufficient, but she’s by no means perfect. In a lot of ways, she’s also selfish and occasionally reckless. Being able to see her flaws helps the audience see her as a three-dimensional, relatable and real character. She’s not an over-the-top comedic caricature, she’s a real woman who is trying her best, and as her story continues we see her at her highest and lowest, which makes her ultimate success all the more exciting and empowering.
Midge Maisel Gloriously Fails And Always Gets Back Up Again
One of the most iconic lines from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is “tits up,” and it’s a motto that Midge lives by throughout the show, but especially in the final moments of the series finale.
In one of the final scenes of the show, she decides to do something “reckless that could go very badly,” for not just her but also Susie, but she can’t let those four minutes of opportunity go. She’s spent too long trying to get her break, and after falling on her face, and getting back up she decides to risk it all with those final minutes on The Gordon Ford Show, and it pays off…big time. She’s learned so much, and risked so much, and she makes one final bet to get the big life she always dreamed of. I think her final words of her Gordon Ford show put her outlook on life and independence best when she said:
I want a big life. I want to experience everything, I want to break every single rule there is. They say ambition is an unattractive trait in a woman. Maybe. But, you know what's really unattractive? Waiting around for something to happen. Staring out a window thinking the life you should be living is out there somewhere but not being willing to open the door and go get it even if someone tells you you can't. Being a coward is only cute in The Wizard of Oz.
Her persistence and will to keep going is the reason she made it, and ultimately she did that on her own. While Susie was always there to help her, Midge made it because she never let her failures get the best of her. And that’s a lesson I think all of us can learn from.
In the end, she claimed her spotlight, as Lenny Bruce predicted, and it was marvelous.
