“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”: The breakthrough comes in the fifth season

streaming review
About the last season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”: The breakthrough is coming – but with hurdles

After five seasons, the award-winning series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, about the rise of comedian Midge Maisel, comes to an end. In the end, she finally experiences the success she had hoped for – but at what price?

Before success comes failure, and that’s true of many great stories, and apparently the story of Miriam “Midge” Maisel in particular: the comedian (played by Rachel Brosnahan) is a star at the beginning of the fifth and final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon Prime) at rock bottom, once again. Lying in bed, two toes frozen off, by the end of season four Maisel had struggled through a horrific New York snowstorm in high heels — an agonizingly long scene that was perfectly metaphorical. But as so often in the past seasons, she gets up again, like a long-distance runner who has only one goal in mind: to finally make the breakthrough.

Viewers have followed Maisel’s rise to the top for four seasons. They’ve settled into the colorful world that series creators Amy Sherman-Palladino (“Gilmore Girls”) and her husband Daniel Palladino conjure up episode after episode. There are the wonderful scenes from the everyday life of the Jewish Weissman family, the fast-paced dialogues and the detailed costumes and sets that make “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” so unique in the series landscape.

“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” concludes its fifth season

At the beginning of the series, which has been running since 2017, Maisel, freshly abandoned by her unfaithful husband, stood on the stage of a New York nightclub and told dirty jokes – the beginning of a career that had never really caught on. Mostly because Maisel got in his own way, for example outed the homosexual singer Shy Baldwin on stage and was promptly thrown out of his opening act. “Two steps forward, three steps back, I don’t feel like it anymore,” complains Maisel in the new season.

Rachel Brosnahan plays Midge Maisel as an ambivalent heroine: boisterous, often rash, yet overflowing with wit, charming and lovable. A force of nature that shook up the male-dominated world of the 1950s and 1960s.

In the fifth season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” Midge has her breakthrough

In the final season, it is now clear almost from the start: the hoped-for breakthrough is coming – but at what price? Viewers get a glimpse into Maisel’s future, where not everything seems to be rosy. Before she can climb the ladder, however, she still has to overcome the usual big and small hurdles: in a television production, she wrestles with her arrogant fellow authors for the best jokes, at home in the huge New York apartment she has to keep her family in check. Tony Shalhoub, best known as “Monk,” and Marin Hinkle play Maisel’s eccentric parents, the spiritualized Abe Weissman and his matchmaker wife Rose, who brings together the children of Jewish families on the Upper West Side.

The characters that populate Maisel’s colorful world have become old acquaintances over five seasons: the eccentric in-laws, ex-husband Joel, who has gained in character over the course of the series, and above all Susie Meyers (Alex Borstein), Maisel’s bad cheerful yet likeable agent and the second heroine of the series. Meyers fights countless battles for her star, more than once she gets Maisel back on her feet.

The series won 20 Emmys

Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino have won a total of 20 Emmys for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” including Best Comedy Series, an award that has never before gone to a streaming show. Both of them don’t seem to have made the decision to end the show voluntarily. “We made the decision together after being told season five will be the final season,” Sherman-Palladino just told the New York Times. As a viewer, you could already feel for some time that the story of Midge Maisel has probably been told, that the ever new dramas are no longer as captivating as they were at the beginning. Now the protagonists have to leave their kitschy, beautiful world. But viewers have at least eight episodes to get used to the farewell.