Why Season 3 of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Was So Disappointing

Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Image courtesy of Amazon Prime.

I am a very big fan of Amazon’s hit series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Or, I was. The first two seasons, especially season one, were just great television. They created a richly imagined 1950s setting filled with quirky and likable characters and they sent their protagonist down a rewarding and liberating narrative journey as she tried to find her voice as a brash female comedienne. In the process they made her stand-up actually enjoyable, because it was linked to her personal life and struggles. I generally detest stand-up, but her act was good because it was presented as the natural outflow of the story the show was telling.

That has all gone up in smoke in season three, which was a terrible, almost maddening disappointment. The period details are still lush and seductive, but there’s only so much flash one can stand without any sizzle. Let’s start with the structural problems - the show is weighed down by horrible, and I mean truly awful, subplots. The A story - Midge going on tour with Shy Baldwin - is still good. Any scene with Midge and Suzie together is pure gold, and her ongoing journey to become a star is still mildly compelling. But any time the show breaks away to spend time developing any of its subplots it becomes almost unwatchable.

Midge’s parents have suddenly, for no reason other than the writers thought it was time to shake things up, become paupers. Tony Shalhoub joins a socialist protest group, which seemed like it might have actually been a re-shoot retroactively and clumsily shoved into the show to pad out the runtime. Joel, who really shouldn’t have remained in this show after the first season, gets an entire subplot with a new love interest as he tries to open a club in Chinatown. I cannot stress enough how bad all these subplots are, and how little they add to the story. Which begs the question - why are they in there?

I have a theory. I think that creator and show-runner Amy Sherman-Palladino has an arc in mind - she wants to reach at least 5 seasons - and she is conserving her material, slow-rolling the A story so the show can definitely make it to 5 seasons or beyond. This means the good stuff is being padded out and lined with terrible subplots, simply for the purpose of making it longer. It’s also getting more ridiculous, going for easy throwaway gags in a way that it didn’t before - like a writers room at Sophie Lennon’s house where the writers have been locked away inside a room for years and don’t know what time or day it is.

It’s kind of a funny little gag, and the show was never afraid of a little irreverent and outlandish humor, but these jokes are starting to veer into Dave Mirkin’s Simpsons Season Five territory (incidentally, those kinds of jokes worked for the Simpsons because that was a cartoon so the boundaries of unreality could be more easily stretched - and the writing was overall just much, much better). I am not sure why the writers didn’t put more effort into crafting better B story lines, but they didn’t. Maybe now that the show is already a hit and won a bunch of awards, everyone feels they can coast on their own past success. Whatever the reason, the result is a flat season three pumped full of awful material that by all appearances is only intended to increase the length of each episode.

The lack of care is evident in the way Midge’s stand-up has gotten away from what actually made it good in previous seasons. It used to be that her routine was carefully tied to whatever was happening in her personal life. Therefore it had resonance. It was funny and personal, and we as the audience could track its evolution from her life to the stage. Now we don’t see her process at all. She just gets on stage and riffs and makes zingers, and they have the hallow staleness of any hack stand-up. Plus, at this point, she has morphed from a spunky woman fighting the constraints of gender roles in the 1950s to a kind of insufferably entitled product of her own privilege doing an impression of a spunky can-do Aw Shucks, Gee Whiz underdog caricature.

I was really disappointed to see this show erode in quality so quickly. It’s almost like the writers looked at everything good that worked in the first two seasons, then turned around and deliberately did the opposite in season three.