The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 4, Episodes 1 and 2 Review

Marvelous Mrs. Maisel review: season 4 starts with a reset

When The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel arrived, it became an Emmy-winning darling almost at once, with a string of strong nominations from 2018 to 2020. A sharp, funny story about a Jewish woman in the 1950s who broke every rule the male stand-up comics of the era were already famous for breaking, it showed what Amazon could do at a time when almost no one expected the company to land a hit. This was that hit.

It ticked the awards-season boxes without effort. Witty dialogue, a Jewish New York setting and a stunning leading lady are what the series does best. It was to Amazon what Breaking Bad was to AMC, what Stranger Things is to Netflix and what Rick and Morty is to Adult Swim: the flagship. Then the pandemic arrived and production stopped for more than two years. Season 3 had landed on December 6, 2019, and season 4 did not appear until February 2022.

Two years is long enough for the culture to move on. Midge's fast, Gilmore Girls-style dialogue and her habit of wanting everything at once faded into the background at a moment when a pandemic, a year of unrest and an unfulfilled promise of a roaring new decade dominated the mood. The early reception of season 4 reflects that. It is less a verdict on the show than a reflection of the times. People want change, and they are tired of watching things play out the same way.

Episodes 4.1 and 4.2: back to square one

Season 4 opens with a hard reset. Midge has wrecked her chances at fame again by outing Shy Baldwin as gay in public during a set at the Apollo. Susie, at the same time, needs to recover her client's money, because the duo is poor again. Both return to New York, buy back the same old apartment, perform at the same old club and live among the same judgmental family, whose own careers and arcs also seem to have rolled back to where they began. Nobody has changed after the promise of so much change at the end of the previous season.

The first episode, “Rumble on the Wonder Wheel”, was written and directed by creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and carries the Coney Island references. The second, “Billy Jones and the Orgy Lamps”, was written and directed by Daniel Palladino, and it finds Midge barely getting by on other people's favors and promises, which echoes seasons 1 and 2 closely. Gone is the confident touring Midge of season 3. The show wants the audience to believe it might be over for her, and the audience knows better, because the season has only just started.

Who actually moves forward

Not everything is a repeat. Sophie Lennon is still outrageous, but she works as a measure of how far Susie has come: managing her was awful, and it gave Susie a reputation as someone who gets things done. Abe's storyline brings in the age-old question of how to make a living from art. And Joel, who seems to be the only character on a real path of growth and responsibility, is in a relationship storyline that has more room to run than most of the season's early threads.

Rachel Brosnahan and Alex Borstein still steal the show. Both give performances that never fail their characters, and the dialogue is as quick as ever, in the talk-a-lot style creator Amy Sherman-Palladino is known for. The show has not forgotten its roots. The Coney Island Wonder Wheel and the family tropes of a 1950s Jewish New Yorker are all there, though it feels slightly different to watch them today, now that conversations about privilege are much louder than they were around 2020.

The cost of the long wait

One problem is hard to wave away: the show took too long to come back. There is more content in every medium than ever before, and Maisel does not have the buzz of Ted Lasso, Fleabag, Euphoria or Yellowjackets. That is not a call for it to imitate them. It is an observation that the first two episodes repeat a great deal of what viewers have already seen, at a moment when going backward feels off-putting.

The release format adds to it. Season 4 has eight episodes and came out in pairs, one pair a week from February 18 to March 11, 2022, in place of the all-at-once binge that defined earlier seasons. For a show with a two-year gap behind it, that pace works against momentum, and some viewers took it as a sign of a series running in place.

Compare that to the show's own history. Season 1 arrived in 2017, season 2 in December 2018 and season 3 in December 2019, a rhythm of roughly one season a year. A gap of more than two years broke that habit and left the series with less goodwill to spend on a quiet start.

Season 4 so far: what resets and what moves on

Marvelous Mrs. Maisel review verdict: the fake-reset is the joke

This Marvelous Mrs. Maisel review takes a different view from the early critics. The reset, in this reading, is the joke. Season 4 is not stuck. It is reacquainting an audience, battered by an enormous amount of entertainment these past few years, with a story from long ago that they have probably half forgotten.

The point of the rebuild is to remember why the series was loved in the first place. The weekly releases may be doing the same work, giving viewers time to settle back into Midge's world instead of racing through it. By the end of the early episodes, the show has reminded the audience who it is and what Midge does: she tears things down. Viewers who judge a season by its first hour should hold the verdict until more episodes have aired.

Lenny Bruce supplies the argument. The real-life comic, and his counterpart in the series, is famously self-destructive. He gets arrested, takes the stage and delivers the truth with no words held back. If he can do it, why shouldn't Midge? That is the key to season 4 as these two episodes lay it out. The audience has been reminded who she is, and the next job is to watch her go off. That is the thesis of this review, and the next episodes will test it.

There is also a craft argument for the quiet opening. Amy Sherman-Palladino wrote and directed the first episode and Daniel Palladino the second, so the pair of hours has a consistent voice, and both lean on the rhythm of the early seasons. A Marvelous Mrs. Maisel review that only counts the repeated plot beats misses that the repetition is staged on purpose, with the same apartment, the same club and the same family in the frame.

Susie is the best evidence. The season starts with her chasing her client's money, but the Sophie Lennon thread shows how far she has come: handling that difficult client earned her a name as someone who gets things done. The reset can take away the comfortable position, but it cannot take away the reputation, and that is the quiet kind of progress a season can build on.

The caution is that a reset only works if the follow-through arrives. Two episodes of treading water are fine when a season is eight episodes long and the payoff is promised, and risky if the payoff slips. The performances are strong enough to give the season the benefit of the doubt, and the writing has earned some trust from its first three seasons.

In short, this is a slow start with a purpose. It is not the show at its sharpest, but it is the show setting up to be sharp again, and with six episodes still to come, there is plenty of room for Midge to prove the point.

Sources

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