This is a bit of a departure for me—a blog post solely concerning one episode of the Amazon Prime TV series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—but it is the finest writing I have ever seen in my life. Season 5, Episode 7, “A House Full of Extremely Lame Horses.” If the writing staff offered a lunch-interview of them but told me it would be it would have to take place in Los Angeles, I’d fly in. If the writing schools aren’t teaching this episode fifty years from now, I’ll be surprised.
The show creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, has won a writing award for this show. In 2018, she won the Primetime Emmy Award for the Season 1 Episode for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. The episode name was “Pilot.” This season was also nominated for an Astra TV Award for Best Writing in a Streaming Series, Comedy in 2023.
So, I’m not saying the writers came out of nowhere. These are probably TV’s finest writers being paid well.
Still, the reader needs one example here to keep going and not think I’m off my rocker. In one scene in this episode, set in 1962, a comedian is on a popular TV show, pitching a book he’s written about his life. He is describing seeing nearly his whole family being killed by Hitler in the death camps. It’s 1962-funny. It’s heartwarming. It sends a message to the 1962 WASP audience that Jews are just like us. The studio audience loves it. And I, a Jew, who lost family in the Holocaust, am breaking out, loudly, hysterically, laughing, and finding it just as heartwarming as the 1962 TV fake WASP audience.
I just said I found a real-time description of a man talking about Hitler killing his family to be funny and heartwarming. And I’m Jewish.
Do you now realize the level of writing talent that went into that episode? What if I told you the episode also contained the key emotional high point of a five-year series, and the writing and acting were just as good as in the part I just described?
What if I told you I had a good guess for how the writers achieved everything they did in this episode, it’s something I have learned a lot about in the last five years of my life as a science fiction writer, and I hadn’t even known this topic existed or was important to writers five years ago?
I hope you’re still reading this. If you are, my guess is two words: Story Structure.
If any writer from Hollywood reads this post, I’d love it if you would reach out to me. It’s a discussion I’d love to have. You can find me using any method listed on my site’s Contact/Social Media page. Amy Sherman-Palladino, if you are reading this, you’ve likely never heard of me. Would you field a communication from a superfan who is also a writer? I am at home, being treated for a brain tumor, so the conversation could come at your leisure.
Anyway, enough personal stuff. On to the promised discussion of the best hour of TV ever written.
Let me first get the elephant out of the closet: this show isn’t just for Jews. One huge theme is the interactions in 1962 New York City between Jews and other cultures: principally Black culture, Italian-American culture, and WASP culture. The actors for all these parts are excellent. The writing and thinking rise to the level that if the team writing these scenes didn’t include Black people and Italian-Americans, at the very least, expert consultants were involved. These aspects of these cultures are rarely discussed elsewhere.
If you are Black and care about Black history, I recommend this show. Ditto for Italian-American. But, not just you. If you have an interest in the period of American history right before the social change in the ‘60s (or even how that social change came about and how it manifests today), watch this show. If you have an even passing interest in women’s studies or gender studies of any sort, you need to have a pad a paper out for taking notes when you watch this show.
And homework: You won’t get 90% of what this episode does if you don’t watch at least seasons 1, 2, and 3, and then season 5 in order. I say 4 can be postponed because I haven’t watched it yet, and the events, assessed from the Internet, affect little in Season 5 other than only a quick set-the-scene bit in episode 1 of Season 5. I intend to watch Season 4 now, but it’s not necessary.
The reason why is that Seasons 1-4 are a straightforward, linear story about a Jewish woman who accidentally becomes a standup comic. It’s enjoyable; it’s funny; it’s well-written. It’s great TV. You’ll love it. But it’s background necessary for you to critically evaluate anything I say in the rest of this post. (Which is fine, because I can’t imagine most people read my posts as “academic” in a pure sense, nor should they. Read on, anyway!)
How’s that for the most fun homework ever? Especially since it’s optional—trust me, just go ahead and keep reading my post—you’ll be fine. I won’t promise no spoilers, though. I can’t. There will be spoilers from this point on. But they’ll only spoil the one episode. And they won’t be bad spoilers that prevent enjoyment; I won’t reveal any twists or surprises.
The episode before was a celebrity roast (testi-roastial) of another major character, set in 1990. My wife thought it was boring. I saw it for what it was: clearing up every major plot point that wasn’t relevant (or at least not more than tangentially) to something coming up that was big coming in Episode 7.
Boy, was I correct. I also figured that the big revelations would be important, but let me allow someone else to summarize the big reveals: https://screenrant.com/marvelous-mrs-maisel-season-5-episode-6-recap-reveals/#:~:text=Gordon%20Ford%20Show-,The%20Marvelous%20Mrs.,Midge%20and%20her%20ally%20Mike. If you don’t want this episode spoiled, don’t click the link.
This is all background at best: what not to be thinking about. But one thing in Episode 6 is important; I’ll get back to why at the end of the post. Midge has made Suzie, her agent, get Gordon Ford’s wife to demand Midge be on the show. The wife is Suzie’s former lesbian lover.
This is hard for Suzie. The ask comes. Suzie is a professional whose identity is tied up bigtime in doing what she does well. What results launches the trajectory for the show from the end of Episode 7 through the finale.
As I said I think story structure is behind the writing’s success, I am going to put that structure in formal outline form, bolding the parts that would have been an outline. Reverse-engineered, of course, but following it can give the reader an understanding of the show.
The story structure is idea-driven. The important ideas will be these bold headings, except in the one case (Roman numeral II), where the goal is to put plot details needed into the reader’s heads and get to the big ideas.
I. Establish the Frame Story for the Episode
Episode 7 starts in 1962 with “The Danny Stevens Show,” where a Jewish actor, played by Hank Azaria in this show, plays an all-American WASP Dad type of guy. In 1962, many TV writers and actors were Jewish; most were writing to be acceptable to WASPs. Fit in—don’t be so ethnic. That’s what Jews went through.
There’s a laugh track. And Mom says their daughter has a date. “A date? With a boy?” is the laugh line. “Yes dear, a date,” and then Stevens accuses his wife of trying to distract him with potatoes.
Pan out to a 1962 apartment. We are no longer on the Danny Stevens Show. The current day is watching it through a vintage TV.
The show that is the frame story as well as what the show does for the actors, writers, and audience is established.
II. Lots of quick scenes, a format for the year, comforts the audience. It is a now-expected format where they know they are supposed to be thinking, not just enjoying, but also noting exactly what plot details are important. By the end, it is all in the viewers’ heads.
Pan out to the 1962 apartment, showing the vintage TV set. Joel’s parents are watching and think Stevens is hysterical. This isn’t high-brow stuff, but neither are they. “Ignore, Grandma; she’s drunk” is the command to Midge Maisel’s kids.
In the dining room, you see Midge with her mother planning an event. The Jewish woman is shown as responsible for everyone: her pushy, often delusional mother; her in-laws; her children. All while trying to make something of herself.
The Danny Stevens show blares, Joel’s parents are having fun. His father says something obnoxious about women. Neither appreciate anything. “Ignore Grandma, honey.” She takes a drag from a cigarette. “And Grandpa, too.”
Midge’s mom claims the piano smells like onions. “Just the Black keys.” Her mother-in-law explains, “It’s a used piano.”
This is serious Woody Allen territory but more. It asks a real question: To what extent does the Jewish family need to be anaesthetized to accommodate WASP expectations of NYC wealth? How dysfunctional was 1962? Should every ethnic group assimilate? What part of culture is worth keeping? And with modern eyes, why is “own voices” and diversity acceptable, often viewed as critical, necessary, and important today, when it wasn’t back then?
Somebody blazed a trail. This show says very put-upon Jewish women.
And we get to plot. Midge is a writer on the Gordon Ford show; she says Danny Stevens will be on it. She is writing just to get on as a comedienne when those aren’t the rules. Midge asks her in-laws if they want to come to the show and watch him live. “You’ve got someone on the inside?” The response to “Who?” is “Me.”
Nobody values Midge’s life goals. They think she’s a nothing because she’s a woman. Yet, she’s obligated to all those who treat her as a nothing—just a tireless caregiver, not a person.
It ends with Midge telling her kids ignoring their paternal grandparents should be a blanket rule. Outside on the porch, Midge’s Mom discusses her event to bring singles together; she’s obsessed with worthless details and ends with telling Midge she knows nothing about love.
In the previous episode flashbacks, we learned the love of her life who threw their marriage away on an affair, sold himself to the mob to free her. He goes to jail for money laundering he proposed because he couldn’t see the love of his life so encumbered. Her manager can only operate mobbed up from the 1950s on, without Midge being mobbed up, thanks to Joel Maisel’s sacrifice.
Midge breaks with Suzie, Suzie who made her, when she finds that Suzie allowed Joel to sell himself to the mob. Midge and Joel never stopped loving each other. Despite Midge nearly marrying Phillip Roth as she becomes famous; despite her sleeping with Lenny Bruce.
Joel is all in for her success. Nobody else is. They are all a drag on Midge. Thus is her life.
We enter scene 2 with a reminder of Midge’s frustration in being held responsible for caregiving and not credited for her accomplishments. It’s 1990; Midge’s mother is delusionally still selling soul mates. Midge is paying a fortune to let her mother live in fantasyland. It’s high camp; quite ridiculous on purpose.
This title sequence ends: The words, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel appear.
Each opening scene starts where the plot does not this season, but this is the longest cold open. Together, it sets the scene of Midge’s life.
We are back in 1962, and we have a house full of people incapable of running a simple appliance. You pay for stuff—you don’t do it yourself. Rich Jews wrapped up in living well, unable to light a pilot light. Midge is fussing with her daughter Esther’s hair.
Abe, maternal Grandpa, former Columbia physics professor, current literary critic for The Village Voice, is at the piano with Ethan, his grandchild. He is busy with a piano lesson, and says this is a good time to learn how to tune out everything in your life.
The Jewish man needs to be accomplished while the Jewish woman supports. Patriarchy. Grandpa, Grandma, and Midge all need help with different things. Nobody can accomplish anything because of competing goals. We learned earlier in a Season 5 episode cold opening that Ethan becomes a farmer on a religious kibbutz because he couldn’t do much of anything expected in America of a Jewish guy. Farming, he could do.
Zelda, the helper, lights a match. The Mom who has no functional adult behaviors, marvels. This is interesting, lack of functional adult behaviors is presented as cultural. The practical European immigrants think these Jews are from outer space. “Did you look in the book?” Their former hired hand asks. The Mom cannot follow any instructions. “Oh, please; if I did that, I’d blow the entire building up.”
Is this intersectional: rich, irresponsible, stupid, and Jewish—pretending to be elsewise for laughs? Midge didn’t know about the book, either, and it’s sitting there. The Jews are helpless in practical concerns, but they have money to just hire someone. In 1962.
Midge is focused on her Gordon Ford show writer work. Her daughter expects the neighbor, former maid, to fix her hair. The hired hand’s husband is very frustrated with these leeches.
Plot detail: Midge has to stop by Ethan’s school for a parent thing before work. Ethan is dressed in a suit. He’s six.
Abe is working for the Village Voice, and his time is flexible. He agrees to take Ethan for his thing.
Midge is at work, the other male writers are listening to her woes; she notices, they can’t appreciate it, and it ends, “How about the tits on Ursula Andress?” said by the actor who plays Midge (Rachel Brosnahan). They accept her as a co-worker; she relishes their acceptance. They all start talking about tits. Midge finds it funny.
They are talking about Danny Steven’s book; only Midge has read it. She’s the most prepared.
They want to set Danny Stevens up to succeed on his Gordon Ford appearance; Be ready in case it falls to us (Gordon’s writers’ room) is the message.
The call: everyone to the railings. The new producer talks. Gordon Ford is usually above. He’s in the crowd. “Hey, Mike. You look great up there,” he says.
Gordon starts asking the new producer about silly stuff like more ashtrays or a receipt. The crowd is laughing. “Can we leave, too, is the question for the new producer.” It leads to “yes” and applause.
These are not bad people. They just want to entertain. It’s a group effort. Gordon Ford is a good guy. Maybe.
Cut to Abe at Ethan’s expensive private school. The school head is showing off “free to be time” for six-year-olds. There’s an engineering group, a math group, a reading group reads a book and writes a play from it and performs it in the teacher’s lounge, the science group, the language group. Abe asks what another group is and gets the answer, “the happy group.” They are just walking in a circle. It makes them happy. Ethan is the leader, and he is an idiot. He will never fill the expected Jewish male role, and Abe realizes it. Abe is told Ethan has taken an aptitude test. Abe says he was a professor who worked at Bell Labs, has patents, and his grandson is a Weissman. There’s no possible way Ethan is happy.
Core Woody Allen material. The NY Jew as a neurotic.
The first cold opening of the season began with Esther in her psychiatrists, needing meds, but a genius from MIT, saying the only one who ever spent time on her and cared was her grandfather. The viewer remembers this. She also remembers nice things said by an older Esther at a celebration for her mother.
Theme: we are all a mess, but some appreciation of those important to you is good.
Back at work, Midge walks in on Danny Stevens. Danny is oh-so-Jewish. “Taking an established seat in a writers’ room is like correcting a man’s Hebrew when you’re from Nebraska,” he says.
He says he came in to ask a favor. Normally, I’m plugging a gig, I’m in Vegas, but this time, I wrote a book, he says. He points to Midge’s copy. “I’m an author. Like Dickens if you grew up in Bensonhurst.”
We are here for you says the male writers. Midge says “Hell, no. You’re the bastard who tried to steal my seat.”
Stevens says, “Funny.” Midge says you tell jokes every time you appear. Danny says I’m a comedian. If I came on and pulled Gordon’s wisdom tooth, it would be weird.
Midge says you wrote a book about your life. Talk about your life. Midge says if it’s interesting and real you can find the humor.
Here is an established man, trusting a woman. He sees through this lens of patriarchy. She’s the best. He wants to trust the best and does.
Where’s the funny? Stevens asks. It’s interesting, Midge replies. It’s real. If it’s interesting and real, you can find the funny. “Great, homework, thanks,” Stevens says.
Stevens is needed. “Excuse me, Danny. Gordon’s ready,” is how it comes from a stafffer.
Kids, find me some jokes, he says to the writers.
He leaves, and Midge just says, “No.”
Will Stevens trust Midge? We don’t know.
Cut back to Abe. A retest finds Ethan has no aptitude for anything. Ethan pops up and says, “Grandpa. Lettuce sticks to your face.” The school head says he hasn’t lost his spot in the “happy group.”
Cut to the show that evening. The Maisel grandparents can’t even acknowledge Midge got them free tickets. They don’t think she can even do that.
III. First part. This season, the audience is comfortable with an argument cut into many pieces, but now we need them thinking linearly. This is the only argument that will be cleft in two, with only something short and light in the middle. Boom, boom, boom from there. In 1962, powerful men can say that individual women might be smart, capable, and an equal to men. They see them as rare unicorns. Most women should be subservient to men in their eyes.
Gordon Ford announces Danny Stevens: America’s sweetheart. He dances on to the band.
Gordon opens the book to his parents. He said they were very tough people; they didn’t have a bed; they had a rock. “They had to flee their village when men in boots on horses said, hey, what’s flammable here.”
The audience is with him. It’s a quest. A quest to immigrate to America, a great place, and the WASPS are comfortable.
Finally, my parents get to Ellis Island where they were immediately quarantined for two months, says Stevens. They were sick; they had everything. They were so sick, the immigration agent changed their name to, and then Azaria goes slapstick with a silly cough. The audience is laughing.
“I can’t go by that name in show business, he says with a big smile”.
“Too Jewish,” he says. The audience finds it hysterical.
He continues about his parents. They get out to a tenement on Delancey he says and proceed to have nine children. In a Yiddish accent, Stevens says, like my mother said, even if you can’t afford the movies, Saturday night is still gonna happen. You gotta do something.
Stevens talks straight with no laugh lines: “Two of the kids died, two others in jail, the rest of the family she had left was wiped out by the Nazis.” The audience hushes.
Stevens turns it around with a big line: The only day I saw my mother cry was the day I told her I was going to be a comedian.
The audience, Midge, and me at home watching this burst into laughter. It’s too funny to be crying about the man’s family being killed by Nazis. And Stevens know it, even if he’s being ripped apart inside. His 1962 role is to make Jews acceptable to WASPS. He can and does.
Midge claps.
Cut to the bar where Gordon hangs out. Stevens comes in: “Where is she? Wonder Woman? Midge, get over here. You sit right here, next to me.” Gordon is there too. “Tonight was a triumph. You did this,” Stevens says to Midge.
Gordon has no idea. Danny Stevens offers Midge a job. She says she’s not a script writer—Gordon says she’s a joke writer. Danny says, “If it’s interesting, you can find the funny. He says, you’re a woman; these are shows starring women.”
Gordon asks, Danny, what are you doing?
“No, no, no. I found her.” Gordon is obsessed with rules. Rules of society. Stevens says, “Fuck that. I see talent, I go after it.”
Gordon accuses Danny of just wanting to sleep with Midge. Gordon had already tried and taken a “no.”
“I’m married, shmucko,” Stevens says. Gordon gets aggressive and is kicked out of the bar.
IV. In 1962, in NYC, Jewish men are obsessed with their intellectual prowess.
We cut to Columbia University, 1954, Abe is a professor. He is toasting to Joel, who will be his son-in-law. He talks about how a Weissman boy will always emerge as a prodigy. Weissman boys are born with immense intellect. When they turn six. He has a record of every generation and their accomplishments. Abe says he ignored Noah for five years, then he picked up a violin and was playing Mozart. The viewer knows Noah is a mess, although indeed smart.
Then we’re in 1962, and Ethan is playing with jam on bread. They are eating lunch, Abe, his two children and their spouses. Abe is livid that the son has no aptitude and his mother only cares about her home renovations. Abe says, not everything is supposed to be fun. The handyman/competent spouse neighbors come back in, complaining to each other.
Abe says to Joel, “What did you do to your son?’ still thinking ignoring him for six years would have made a prodigy, not an idiot.
Ethan leaves, pretending to be a chicken.
III. Second part. In 1962, powerful men can say that individual women might be smart, capable, and an equal to men. They see them as rare unicorns. Most women should be subservient to men in their eyes.
Suzie is playing poker. A comedy showcase is being run by Jack Parr; Midge is only women in the showcase. Mike can’t get Gordon to change the rule about writers never being performers on the Gordon Ford show. Suzie decides to count on Parr, instead. Suzie says thank you to Mike for the tip about getting Midge into the Showcase.
It’s the next day at work on the Gordon Ford show. Midge is asked why she’s getting a raise. She doesn’t know.
You’re making as much as the men. “If this gets out every working woman will want to be paid as much as a man, and our entire civilization will collapse,” Midge says in a concerned voice.
The answer, from Mike, the producer: “Exactly.”
“Can’t help you, Mike,” Midge says.
Got a sec, Midge asks Gordon and forces him to talk. “Why did I get a raise?”
“Danny Stevens tried to poach you, I had to give you a raise.”
Midge says Stevens wasn’t hitting on her. Gordon said it was happening.
She confesses, she’s doing the Parr showcase. She asks if Gordon will book her first. His answer: “No.’
When she leaves, Gordon pushes books off his desk in anger.
The Parr showcase is awful except for Midge. She’s great, but Parr doesn’t care.
V. Black-Jewish-Italian relations during this period described and examined
Okay, at this point, we are getting to things that touch on my lived experience. I am going to mix talking about this episode, citing real-world events and pop culture, and my own lived experience for this Roman numeral.
I grew up in Cleveland. Tensions between Black people and Jews were low. Tensions between Black people and Italian-Americans were high. Tensions between Jews and Italian-Americans were low. I am describing the 1970s and 1980s for me, but I will go back to 1962 Mrs. Maisel time based on what I know to be true.
I think some of this will also describe other parts of the county. And I think the character model for at least part of the show character, Dina, is Stephanie St. Clair. She is the only mob boss I can find by Googling. Here’s Google: A racketeer and activist in Harlem, New York in the early 20th century. She ran a numbers game and resisted the Mafia's control of gambling in Harlem. St. Clair was a local legend for her denunciations of corrupt police. She was worth an estimated $300,000 in 1930, which is equivalent to about $4.3 million today.
I don’t think there ever was a Black woman accepted as a mafia mob boss. But there are ones who could have been. The show makes Dina’s character plausible enough that I buy her.
For 1962, in the Cleveland I know or in the show’s Manhattan, Black people and Italian-Americans hate and/or fear each other.
Spike Lee did a lot with this, but there’s a subtle thing he did that most of America missed. In Jungle Fever, the hoodlum brother asks the architect brother (of the same mother; I’m not being cute here), whether his white girlfriend is Jewish, and he says Italian, the response is that you always do everything the hard way.
In 1984, in college, I got the same response a lot. Lots of Black people I met told me they’d never met a Jew growing up, but their parents told them that Jews were a cut less racist than the average white person and Italians were a cut more racist. That’s what Spike Lee was seeing, too.
Dina was totally comfortable with her partnership with Suzie, working for Midge out of professional responsibility and actual caring about Midge, until Suzie was going to screw over a Black man because Suzie felt a greater responsibility to Midge. Midge wouldn’t let her screw over this Black man.
Back to Black-Jewish relations. At this point, you might want to read a blog post I made that’s a review of a film about the relations, personal influence, and musical influence between Nina Simone and Shlomo Carlebach. The film is called Soul Doctor. Nina Simone’s family is promoting it. If you have no idea who Nina Simone is, at least YouTube her. Better yet, click all the YouTube links in my post after you read it. https://www.allandyenshapiro.com/post/stories-that-tell-lies
Back to personal. I went to a high school that was half-Black, half-white (Shaker Heights High School). Importantly, both white and Black went from dirt poor to very rich. The school was better than any private school, so rich white and Black people sent their kids there. The community motto was “A Community is Known by the Schools it Keeps.”
I live in “The City of Palms,” now.
When I was little and lived in Cleveland Heights, some of my first babysitters were Black. They lived across the street. My neighborhood was half-Black, half-Jewish. We got along.
I later lived in Berkeley. The Black Panther Party started in Oakland, a twin city. The seed money to start them and their first meeting place was The Cheese Board in Berkeley. The owners were Holocaust survivors. They had the best cheese and the second-best bread in the Gourmet area of Berkeley all the way into the beginning of this Millennium. I was a patron from 1988 to 1997 when I moved to Delaware.
The important points: 1) There would have been no Black Panthers without this couple, who were Holocaust survivors; 2) The Panther doctrine that some white people could be allies were in part due to these Jews; 3) When I lived in Berkeley 50% of the white people were Jewish. If anyone spoke to a white person on the streets, odds were 50-50 you were talking to a Jew. (And no, not all Jews are white; anywhere other than the US, you could be talking about 75% people of color or more, but in the US, 90% of us are white.)
So, why did Dina go mafia job boss rather than Black Panther? 1962 was too early. The Panthers didn’t start until 1966. It was likely a fact checker on the show that found this and decided Dina must become a mafia boss, not a Panther. This viewer found the choice plausible.
Midge was the Black man’s ally. She tried to make Suzie (also Jewish) be the Black man’s ally.
There have lately been rifts in the Black-Jewish alliance. The recent ones are over the Israel/Palestine situation. I have blogged a lot on this issue. I have also published stories in the Middle East and co-edited an anthology of stories set there. Readers of this post might want to read my earlier blog posts. Here are links:
To wrap this background up and get back to the show, there were many Jews involved with the Italian mafia. What happened in the show with Joel was plausible, as sad as it was. The relationship between Suzie and the mob was absolutely plausible.
You see what I meant when I said Black and Italian-American people should be watching this show to learn about their own history?
So, the part of the show where Midge stands up as an ally to a Black man: She kills it on the Jack Parr showcase. The audience loves it and gives lots of compliments.
Parr and his manager don’t get it. He wants to talk about James Howard. He’s got a movie coming out soon. James is black.
Suzie said she wants to help James, but it’s Midge’s turn. Midge steps in and tells Parr’s guy to book James. Midge says to Suzie don’t hurt James. Pete (Parr’s guy) says Midge is a class act.
Suzie is talking to James; she says she wants to turn it down. It’s not your turn. How about you make it your turn. “Book me, or I’ll find someone else who will,” James says. The viewer never finds out what happens to James.
A mob-owned Jew, happy to run with Italian-American thugs, just can’t be the ally of a Black man. A nice Jew can. In 1962, most Jews can. Most of the freedom riders are Jewish. Jews stick their necks out big time because they want to live in a country where freedom means something. That means banding together with Black people. Jews and Blacks are allies in 1962.
VI. The Jewish Woman still has responsibility to family, and it’s killing her to fulfill that and still be an important person in the world, doing what she wants to do.
Mrs. Maisel cuts to 1978. “You’re So Vain” plays. The words on the screen say “Upper East Side, 1973.” Back to the commercial for Midge’s mother’s hobby. The money guy tells Midge it’s a huge drain, having to buy the building. Midge says, “This place is more important to my mother than to anything or anyone, including her whole family. This is all I can do for her in the brief time she has left. Book the Australian tour.
Back to Midge’s apartment in 1962, the bathroom won’t be fixed in time for her mother’s stupid event.” I’m going to have to rent a hall,” her mother says. Midge retreats to the bathroom, throws a porcelain soap dish, and breaks down crying.
This is the emotional high point of the entire series I mentioned. This is the put-upon Jewish woman, expected to manage every relationship with emotional intelligence. And it’s too damn much to also do something with her life. Not everything is possible all at once. And Superwoman breaks down. If only for a moment. And Rachel Bresnahan’s acting drives it though. Wonderful writing and wonderful acting. A moment of shock for the audience, then tears, then sympathy.
And for all of you dithering over exact wording to not make you feel triggered with your gender/ethnic/sexual orientation/cultural identities, you would never have made the progress you made in America without 1962 and very real women like Midge Maisel. You need to watch this show to know how you ever got the choices you have today.
VII. Some men are capable of seeing through the patriarchy and becoming the allies of women
Abe sees Esther in the hallway. Abe knocks on the door of the bathroom and inquires about Midge.
Esther goes to the piano and starts playing classical music. Abe is amazed and delighted.
The audience remembers Esther in two cold openings. One as the genius whom only her grandfather ever supported. One as calling her mother a trailblazer. She is absolutely sincere in both places.
By the way, I’m not intuiting about Abe seeing through the patriarchy. He’s a critic for the Village Voice. When the show needs an intellectual to communicate information, they use him. It’s in episode 8.
VIII. The Jewish man had a critical role to play in 1962 America. At the time, the writers are saying the role was just as important but more public than the Jewish woman’s role. This is accomplished by closing the frame story.
Back to the Danny Stevens show. Back to a date with a boy.
The date is named Skippy. The words are from The Danny Stevens show. “Hi, Skippy. Hi, Nancy. You look swell.” Danny agrees to not spoil Nancy’s date. “That’s the man I married,” comes from his wife.
“I was just going to say, you look beautiful,” Stevens says to his daughter.
Danny Stevens is alone. He sits down at the piano and ends with a song. It’s sappy. “I’ve got a case of Nancy is a lyric.” Nancy (with the laughing face) is the credit on the title. Credits end.
The role of the Jewish male in 1962 is to be out with the WASPS, comfortable, and not offending them. Danny Stevens does this in every shot he is in with this episode.
In 1962, Kennedy is president. Kennedy believes in separation of church and state. He has fought an election where many Americans think he’s going to sell our country out to the Pope.
The Jews are with Kennedy throughout, and he is with them. My father was a Kennedy Democrat. He talked a lot about fairness and fighting for the little guy. He thought what was happening to Black people was horribly unfair. His decision not to move to Mississippi in the 1960s and do civil rights law when his job in anti-trust was going away with the US Justice Department pivoting to civil rights was based on one thing. Me. He couldn’t see raising a Jewish son in Mississippi. He did private work in anti-trust for the next few years instead and didn’t need to leave Cleveland.
But he never stopped regretting passing on the call to help Black people in the deep south.
Okay, he didn’t totally pass. He became an expert on civil rights law and did whatever he could do from Cleveland.
Back to the show.
At this point, the show’s ending is clear. Midge will give a breakout stand-up performance that launches the rest of her career. We don’t know the details, but we guess there will be try-fail cycles. It is the only secret the show hasn’t revealed. However, we do know that Midge’s 1962 manager (Suzie) asking Gordon’s wife (and Suzie’s former lesbian lover) to get Midge on the Gordon Ford show as a comedienne performer, not just a writer, was the stated goal. It may be the actual route; it may not. But this will all become explicit in the last two episodes of the series is plain as day. The enjoyment will be in how it comes about.
The writers have already achieved all this in Episode 6. The viewer now understands what’s coming in Episodes 8 and 9. Episode 7 didn’t need to say a word.
That’s also great writing.
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