The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Four Minutes Review: A Perfect Finale

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Four Minutes review: the payoff the series earned

The finale of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel closes a long run that has seen Midge do everything she can to seize her moment. From her earliest arrests alongside Lenny Bruce to the wreckage of her relationship with Shy Baldwin, the comedian has built her career and burned bridges at every step. She stumbles forward and rises to the occasion, in a will-she-or-won’t-she story about the fact that the path to success is rarely straight.

Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the series premiered on March 17, 2017, ran five seasons and 43 episodes, and starred Rachel Brosnahan as Miriam “Midge” Maisel, with Alex Borstein as her manager Susie Myerson. Like Mad Men before it, this period piece of the 1960s is likely to be discussed for years. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Four Minutes episode works as a complete episode of television and as a summary of everything the show has argued.

This season’s big question was whether Midge would finally get her appearance on the Gordon Ford show, a goal that seemed impossible for most of the year. The episode answers it in a simple, powerful way: a stand-up routine.

Lenny Bruce at the end of the road

The episode opens on Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby), doing stand-up at a club on the West Coast, in 1965. Kirby’s Bruce does almost nothing on stage but complain about arrest records and a grand jury. He is bombing, forgetting how to do a comedy bit, and eventually dancing for the audience. The scene reads as an homage to the final stretch of Bruce’s career, when his legal troubles made him hard to book across the country and pushed him far from the East Coast clubs where he had thrived.

The contrast with earlier seasons is the point. Viewers have seen Bruce at his peak, including the Carnegie Hall episode, and here he is a legend diminished. Susie talks to him after his set, but the writing is on the wall. Even Midge cannot bring herself to see him. The scene plays as a warning about the cost of success, and of failure, and it frames the stakes for Midge’s own career.

The call from Gordon Ford

In the present of the story, Midge’s children fake an illness to skip school, and her father Abe leaves Rose to cope while he goes to work as a theater critic. Midge keeps receiving calls she does not recognize, and learns at the office that Mike Carr, from Gordon Ford’s show, has been trying to reach her. Gordon Ford has news: she is finally getting the appearance she wanted. At Susie’s office she shares the news, and it is clear that the booking exists because of Hedy’s intervention the week before.

Elsewhere, her ex-husband Joel is visiting his father’s textile factory, where it emerges, in a funny way, that he fell in the shower and that his wife Shirley, trying to help, fell too. The two sit down and talk about their lives, and agree that Joel will retire and the factory will be sold. When Midge phones everyone she knows to tell them she will be on the show that night, Joel says it is fine to talk about him on air. The two are divorced, but they clearly love each other.

Preparation is a comedy of its own. Midge keeps changing dresses, first because she is in work clothes and then because of pigeon droppings she picked up at Susie’s offices. At the rehearsal, Midge runs jokes with Susie while a new dress arrives as a surprise gift for the night. Midge tries to reach Abe with the news, and he tells her it is wonderful, a surprisingly warm moment. Abe and Rose then try to get to the studio, but every cab in New York seems taken, and a lovely exterior shot circles the city.

At 30 Rock: a booking that is not what it seems

At the studio, astronaut Alan Shepard and Carol Burnett are among the night’s guests. Midge’s hopes are dashed when Gordon Ford reveals that she is coming on only as a special-interest segment, as a writer. Susie screams across the offices at Mike, who tries to help. It is clear that Gordon changed her role at the last second out of spite, in keeping with his possessiveness whenever Midge considered another offer. Her name is not even announced when the guests are introduced.

Once the show is on air, everyone Midge has met over the series appears in the audience. When her moment comes, Gordon barely lets her speak, belittles her and then cuts to a commercial with four minutes of show left. Everyone panics, because minutes of airtime meant far more in that era, when the audience for a late-night program was so large.

The four minutes

This is what the show has been about all along: the moment a person takes when the call comes, approved or not, the shot taken against all odds. Time slows. Midge sees the microphone. The room is silent, and her family, friends and loved ones are on their feet. She asks Susie, in a very Maisel way, if this is what it takes, knowing she can do something that will ruin them. Everyone knows.

Midge then says she has never been good at following rules, and what follows is a routine that begins slowly and subtly and builds to the best of everything the series has shown. This review will not spoil the content. It is enough to say that it is funny, that it pays off themes from five seasons, and that it is the best scene of the series. By the episode’s account, the consequences are real: Gordon tells her privately that she is fired.

The finale then jumps to 2005, where Midge, now in her seventies, lives alone in a grand Manhattan apartment and still performs. Susie, retired on the West Coast, calls her, and the two reminisce, watching old Jeopardy! tapes together. It is a quiet coda for a show that spent most of its time at full speed.

The family around the spotlight

What keeps the episode from being a single scene is the way it spreads the attention. Abe, once a stern professor, now works as a theater critic and tells Midge the news is wonderful. Rose, who has been ignoring the phone because it was left off the hook, realizes how big the moment is and hurries to the studio with Abe. Joel, Midge’s ex-husband, gives her blessing to tell any story about him. Each of these small beats reminds the viewer how far these characters have come from the pilot, in which Midge’s world was a tidy Upper West Side apartment and a bad stand-up night.

The episode’s structure, a day in the life that ends in a performance, also helps. Everything that happens in the first half, the dress trouble, the scramble for cabs, the last-minute change in her billing, sets up the final scene by making the stakes concrete. By the time the commercial break hits, the audience has lived through the same frustrations as Midge.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel at a glance

• Creator: Amy Sherman-Palladino; platform: Prime Video; premiere March 17, 2017.
• Series finale: “Four Minutes,” season 5, episode 9, released May 26, 2023.
• Length of the run: five seasons and 43 episodes.
• Core cast: Rachel Brosnahan, Alex Borstein, Michael Zegen, Marin Hinkle, Tony Shalhoub, Kevin Pollak and Luke Kirby as Lenny Bruce.
• The final scene is set in 2005, with Midge in her seventies.

Verdict: a finale that earns its title

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Four Minutes is a rare finale: funny and emotionally exact. It gives the audience the scene it has wanted since the pilot, and then it spends time with the people around Midge, Susie, Joel, Abe and Rose, instead of leaving them as props in her moment.

It is the kind of ending that makes viewers look back. The writing and the performances reward patient viewers, and the structure rewards anyone who has followed the show from the beginning.

The team behind the series, including Sherman-Palladino and Brosnahan, should be proud of the result. They made something close to art, and the finale stands as a worthy farewell for a show that won a long list of awards, including the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 2018.

Viewers who need a reason to start or restart the series could do worse than watching this episode’s opening and ending side by side: Lenny Bruce at the bottom, Midge at the top, and the long, funny road in between.

Sources

• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Wikipedia — Checked against: season and episode list, cast, air dates.