The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Boundary-Pushing Final Season

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel recently wrapped its run with a stunning reckoning about gender inequity. The Emmy award-winning Amazon Original dramedy, created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, focuses on a newly divorced, Jewish aspiring female comedian and her family in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of the show’s five-season run, the ever-funny, often-poignant protagonist, Midge Maisel (played by Rachel Brosnahan), snaps in the best possible way when she explicitly and clearly pushes back against the sexism she previously let slide or diffused with humor — and she succeeds because of it, which should be a lesson to us all.

Over time, we’ve seen Midge denied bookings as a stand-up comedian on stages run by men, being paid less than male co-workers, and even being denied credit from stores she regularly patronizes once she is divorced.

And here’s the power of television: Women viewers who are relatively privileged like Midge, queer women like Midge’s manager, Susie Myerson (played by Alex Borstein), Black women like Susie’s assistant Dinah Rutledge (played by Alfie Fuller), and immigrant women like Zelda (no last name), the Maisels’ domestic worker (played by Matilda Szydagis), may recognize the analogs today — decades later than the show’s setting— in their own lives, and see that we need more reckonings, on screen and in life.

In the show’s final episode, “Four Minutes,” Midge Maisel literally grabs the mic on The Gordon Ford Show, the nighttime variety show where she works as the only woman writer in an all-male writers room, after being told she absolutely can’t have the spotlight. She disobeys the show’s host and her boss, to perform a four-minute stand-up act. Midge knows it will end her writing career on the show, but hopes — correctly, as we learn — it will launch her future stardom. Earlier in the final episode, Midge also acknowledges explicitly to her co-workers that she is a parent and a caregiver — identities that Midge and many of us try to hide at work.

In the show’s final hour, Midge finally says the quiet part out loud, undoubtedly articulating what many people would like to say to their co-workers, bosses, and anyone else who will listen. Like millions of women in the paid workforce today from all backgrounds and economic circumstances, and like many unmarried women and women of color in the workforce in Midge’s era of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Midge Maisel is a parent who cares for her own parents while aiming to hold down jobs (in a department store, in comedy and adult clubs, and on The Gordon Ford Show) in workplaces that are hostile and do not offer policies that support working caregivers. Work-family challenges on screen and in life are often treated as personal, private, and something to hide rather than something to celebrate, declare, and provide for, and Midge’s monologue refreshingly breaks the stigma.

As a gender equity expert, I want to know: What would Midge Maisel in her prime say about the state of women’s equality in the U.S. today, both its failings and its improvements from her day?

Would Midge call out of the fact that women workers are still paid less than men, on average, in every job and industry, and that Black, Latine, Native, and some Asian women, as well as LGBTQ women, are paid less — but celebrate a record number of women Fortune 500 CEOs, athletes, comedians, film directors, and more? Would she abide the fact that women with children still face bias at work — but celebrate that advocacy in the wake of a global pandemic has drawn more attention to caregiving than ever before? Would she use humor or outrage or both to call out the fact that the United States is still the only major country in the world without a national paid leave policy for new parents and family caregivers — but celebrate the creation of paid leave programs in 13 states and the District of Columbia, including in her own home state of New York? And would she focus on the hypocrisy of these realities against the fact that abortion is now banned or restricted in half of states, with disproportionate harm to poor women and women of color — and applaud the states that are safe havens?

Midge’s reckoning isn’t the only boundary-pushing in the show’s final season, and in that there are lessons for all viewers. For example, in the show’s penultimate episode, “The Princess and the Plea,” Midge’s aging father, Abe Weissman (played by Tony Shaloub), has a personal awakening about his own role in perpetuating sexism through differential treatment and expectations of his female and male children and grandchildren — a moment remarkable enough for Shaloub to comment on it in the Hollywood Reporter. We learn in a flash-forward scene that Abe will become one of his granddaughter, Esther’s, most important academic and intellectual mentors as she earns a Ph.D., an evolution from the Abe of earlier decades.

The show’s final episode also pushes back on pitting people from underrepresented groups against each other. In Dinah Rutledge, a Black woman who works for white talent manager Susie Myerson, we see the courage of a subordinate to speak out against her boss’s notion that a rising Black actor client needs to “wait his turn” for a break in the business so that Midge can appear on a major nighttime television variety show first — making clear that both racial and gender discrimination is intolerable, and that, as a Black woman, she understands both. We learn in one of the show’s time jumps to the future that Dinah will become a powerhouse talent manager in her own right, defying the odds against her and showing that standing up for equity isn’t something to fear.

Midge Maisel and the members of her family and community are composites of millions of people’s lived experiences, reflections, acknowledgments, and reckonings with gender, race, work, family, and care. The show hasn’t been perfect: Viewers are left with the suggestion that Midge’s focus on her work has soured her relationship with her children into adulthood, perpetuating the idea that women can’t have it all. The Maisel family’s domestic worker, Zelda, is treated as comic relief until late in the show’s final season when her new husband shines a light on the ways in which the family has taken her labor for granted. Black and Asian character stereotypes show up at multiple points with too little reflection.

Still, the final season of the show manages to shine a light on misogyny, racism, and an us vs. them zero-sum mentality that permeates in too many spaces and contexts, and — through beloved characters who, eventually, reckon with those systems and their own role in perpetuating them — suggests a path forward that resonates.

Like good television should, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel might spur viewers’ insights and even activism. The show holds up a mirror to the past and forces us to consider the present in a way that might be the beginning of a journey for viewers: What can we do, like Midge, Abe, and Dinah, to question the circumstances in which we live, and seek to make them better? And where do we all go from here that will lead to our individual and collective success?