Not everyone is crazy about Midge: What was the fourth season of The Amazing Mrs. Maisel like?
A continuation of the stand-up comic book series that is far more thoughtful and logical than it first appears.
The answer to the question in the title is succinct and succinct: more sad and less festive than all the previous ones. "The Amazing Mrs. Maisel" is a domestic extravaganza of dresses, shoes, handbags, humoresques, and quotations from the Torah. All of the screen's worst disappointments end with a bottle of wine and a couple of witticisms, and after the debacle, Midge (still the brilliant Rachel Brosnahan) picks herself up, gets on her heels and, chirping nonstop, moves on. Season four begins with a fiasco: a tour with singer Shai Baldwin (Leroy McClain) ended without resuming, Miriam has a textured nervous breakdown, after which the stand-up comic decides that she is not ready to repeat her mistakes and will only work for her name from now on. That's easy to say, but the manifesto is much harder to embody - the hihonk-hahonk industry is set up differently.
One of the main circumstances of the new eight episodes to protest is the disappearance of the center of gravity. At first it was the Gaslight Club, in season two it was the Catskill resort, shrouded in a shroud of explanation with her parents, and in season three it was touring and the skill of life on the road. Now Midge is given to herself: the comic finds a full-time job at an illegal strip club and refuses offers to open for big stars (and even open for her nemesis Sophie Lennon). Her creative greatness goes off the big bosses' talent list, but in an erotic variety show among feathers, sequins and boas, Mrs. Maisel can say whatever she wants without fear of consequences. But hardly these albeit beautiful (another triumph of the staged part) but chamber evenings can be called a big change and a new constant, all around less: small expenses, small quarrels, tiny successes. Midge came to the beginning, but already in the rights of the mistress - her home, her career, and even her parents, who found themselves in the care of the artist.
The spiral motion and the actual return to the starting point, to that very apartment, rather upset the audience: it had already happened to Mrs. Maisel. But despite the blind adoration, showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino is quite thoughtful and consistent about the fates of her characters. In season four, quietly, without fanfare or merry-go-rounds (not counting the Connie Island ride scene), the main arc of Midge concluded: the heroine finally matured. It was her infantilism and inability to be independent that was the starting point of the plot in the pilot. "The custodial husband is gone, the world has collapsed, the housewife and mother of two has had to grow up overnight for all her previous 26 years. And what awaits on the other side of Neverland? Taxes, debts and scandals with the milkman for an extra bottle. The adventures are not as interesting as touring with America's top favorite. Somewhere here, between the baby pots and unpaid bills, lurks a red-hot thought: emancipation isn't always fun, even if you're a stand-up comic.
More paradoxically, there's no way the Amazing Mrs. can forgive the fact that she's no longer perfect. Most femo-centric heroines are canonized in pop culture for their flaws, whether it's Phoebe Waller-Bridge's "Trashy" or Villanelle from "Killing Eve." Maisel endures vicious rebukes and accusations of vanity, selfishness, and disregard for motherhood. The femininity of Miriam's persona by the fourth season is aligned with the desire to possess male "privileges": allowing herself to swear on stage, make dirty jokes, have sex without obligation, genuinely desire revenge (and then, of course, forgive and ask for forgiveness) and even bring the future first lady to tears. It is the contradictory moments in behavior that become an important developmental milestone - even though the viewer is not there yet, but Midge has already allowed herself to be imperfect, to walk around with disheveled hair and not cook a brisket every weekend. And that's a tiny, but feat.
The myth of a superheroine more perfect than Wonder Woman and no less powerful than Captain Marvel is not the only relic that has fallen. Chaos reigns everywhere in season four: probably not only the machinations of the writers, but also the pandemic production and the endless postponements are to blame. The script tosses jumbled kicks of varying degrees of force to one and all: Susie (Alex Borstein) finds a new magician client (Gideon Glick), Rose (Marin Hinkle) turns matchmaking into a small business, and Abe Weisman (Tony Shalub) writes articles for the idea and intoxicatingly believes in the power of words. The lines of transformation are still only outlined on the dotted line, but the stereotypical patterns fail in more ways than one.
Lenny Bruce is also a victim of the uncovering (beware of spoilers, everyone who enters here: if you haven't finished watching the season, save your reading for later). The sacred cow of "The Amazing Mrs. Maisel," the nervous prince of the NYC stand-up scene, has also finally become human and stepped back from the romanticized and elusive image of the legendary entertainer. Bruce is perhaps the most surprising mister in this epic: he lives on his own. Luke Kirby was supposed to appear in the pilot for one cameo appearance, but ended up becoming the show's mascot -- all-powerful and untouchable. His and Midge's attraction was the thread that connected Palladino's fictional world to the paragraphs of mid-century history. But this connection also existed by its own rules--no one dared to take the final step toward a direct collision between the fictional and the documentary. Now that platonic infatuation had yielded to attraction, the impregnable bastion of the romanticization of the profession was also destroyed. The electricity in the air has become flesh and blood, and the fairy tale has become fiction. Lenny spells out the illusory nature of his own myth: the comedian is what the audience sees him as. That is, standing on stage with a microphone rather than lying with a killer hangover in a nursery not his own child-the legend of Lenny Bruce is far from routine. Midge witnesses the collapse of yet another ideal - her mentor: from now on, she (like the rest of us) knows that Bruce's tragic end is a foregone conclusion, which means the series finale will break everyone's heart. But Kennedy has just been elected president for his first term, which means it's 1960 and Lenny Bruce will live another six years.
"The Amazing Mrs. Maisel" will end in its fifth season, as announced by Amazon, and the fourth consistently suggests that there is no such thing as immortality. The jokes have taken on a bitter tone, there is less humor, and there are more episodes where you can't even laugh through a lump in your throat. For example, one of the episodes is dedicated to "Gaslight" steward Jackie - the writers left a touching tribute to the artist Brian Tarantino, who passed away in 2019. His funeral eloquently underscores that things won't be the same, and that the world outside of "Gaslight" is much more complicated.
Amy Sherman-Palladino uncompromisingly marked the main direction of the heroine: Midge rushes forward not to the old-fashioned "happily ever after", but as far as possible, in search of her own point of at least temporary peace of mind. It's hard to guess where this snowy road will lead, the creators have many more surprises up their sleeve. Let's say Rachel Brosnahan's husband Jason Ralph, who played the producer of "The Gordon Ford Show" and will probably be one of the central characters of season five. But if Amy Sherman-Palladino doesn't stumble over the audience's entreaties, season four will be remembered as a shaky bridge to a dramatic, painful and ambiguous finale to the odyssey of the amazing Mrs. Maisel.
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