The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 3: Everything Going Right Goes Wrong

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 3 explained

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, released its third season on Amazon's Prime Video on December 6, 2019. It runs eight episodes, down from ten in season 2, and Rachel Brosnahan again leads as Miriam "Midge" Maisel, a 1950s housewife turned stand-up comic. Alex Borstein returns as her manager Susie Myerson, with Michael Zegen, Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle as Joel, Abe and Rose.

The season's central idea is easy to miss in the early episodes, because the early episodes are pleasant. Midge is on the road, she is good at the job, and people keep opening doors for her. Critics at the time called that a safe season, more of what the show had already done. The finale answers them. A run of success is exactly what makes the ending hurt, because the show spends seven episodes making the viewer believe in a future that it then removes.

One idea sits underneath the whole run: the artist is also the product. A stand-up comic puts her own life on stage, so a rejection never lands on the act alone. It lands on her. Season 3 keeps testing that idea against Midge, Susie and, in a smaller way, Abe.

Midge on the road with Shy Baldwin

The season opens with "Strike Up the Band", in which Midge performs at a USO show ahead of touring with Shy. The second episode, "It's the Sixties, Man!", introduces Joel's future girlfriend Mei and Susie's new client. The tour then moves through several cities, with Las Vegas and Florida as the stops that matter.

Midge is out of her depth at first and recovers fast. Friends on the tour give her advice, and as the opening act she works the crowd with her usual speed and charm. She also wins over Shy's crew and his manager, Reggie Harris, played by Sterling K. Brown. By midseason she is one of Shy's personal confidants.

Her Florida stop includes the best stretch of the season: a quiet, affectionate meeting with Lenny Bruce, played by Luke Kirby. She asks him how she did, he tells her she is good, and he books her onto a late-night television show before a night out that suggests the two should be more than friends. Viewers who know that Bruce died of an overdose in the 1960s watch the scene with that knowledge in the back of their minds, and the show uses it.

Susie, Sophie Lennon and the Miss Julie disaster

Susie has a rockier season. She signs Sophie Lennon, played by Jane Lynch, the comic who dislikes Midge and has built an empire on a yokel persona. When Sophie insists on being taken seriously as an actor, Susie delivers the whole package: a private stage on Broadway, a team of producers, a co-star in Cary Elwes and the title role in Strindberg's Miss Julie. It looks like a break for everyone involved.

Then Sophie loses her nerve on opening night, breaks down mid-scene and slides into her usual stand-up routine, wrecking the play and the work of everyone who built it. It is the most uncomfortable scene of the season, in the useful sense of the word. Susie also has a rough time of her own in Vegas and learns a few lessons from Shy's manager before a family matter pulls her back.

Abe, Rose and Joel at home

The Weissman and Maisel households are in flux, and the season spends real time on them between tour dates. Abe is out of work and has given up his Columbia apartment, and he drifts toward a group of idealistic communists who want to start a paper. It collapses. He then visits an old friend, the playwright Asher Friedman, played by Jason Alexander, and writes a critique of how his friend was treated on Broadway. The New York Times publishes it, and Abe brings it up with everyone he meets.

Rose turns down income from her family's trust fund, which removes the money behind the family's lavish lifestyle. It also answers an old question about how a professor's salary paid for a five-bedroom apartment, a maid and the furnishings. Midge, in a typical Midge move, begins putting in effort to buy her old apartment back.

Joel agrees to a divorce despite the hookup that closed season 2. He settles into being a father and plans a nightclub in Chinatown, discovers something shady going on beneath his space, and starts dating Mei, a medical student and local. She helps him secure his liquor license, and Joel resents needing a woman's help right up to the moment he needs hers and Midge's.

The Apollo finale

The finale puts Midge on the Apollo stage minutes before Moms Mabley, played by Wanda Sykes, who kills with her set. The moment makes the season's blind spot visible. Midge is a Jewish woman, but she is also white, and she has taken a spot at the Apollo and on Shy's tour that could have gone to a Black comedian. When she panics, Reggie suggests she build her routine around Shy, since it is his hometown and the audience adores him.

It works with the crowd. Then a joke about Shy's sexuality, something he told her in confidence, goes onstage too, and in the early 1960s the risk to him is enormous. He fires her in the final scene over an idea his own manager floated and will not admit to. Midge ends the season with no trust fund, no apartment, no tour, a blacklist in New York that Sophie maintains and no job prospects.

Where each character ends season 3

• Midge: fired by Shy Baldwin, blacklisted in New York by Sophie Lennon, with no tour and no income.
• Susie: burned by the Miss Julie collapse, still Midge's manager and friend, with a Sophie Lennon client to manage.
• Abe: out of academia, with a Times byline he has not stopped mentioning.
• Rose: free of the family trust fund, and building something on her own.
• Joel: divorced, a nightclub in Chinatown on the way, and a new relationship with Mei.

Season 3 review: does the slow start pay off?

Mostly, yes. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 3 does repeat ground the show has covered, and anyone expecting a bigger swing in episodes two through six will find the same pleasures as before: the fast dialogue, the family comedy, the period detail. Little is at stake for a long time. The Maisels get connections, second chances and a lot of luck.

That ease is a setup, and the finale proves it. A season in which Midge is hired, praised and welcomed makes her firing feel earned in the worst way. She did the work, made the jokes and won the crowd, and one decision in a dressing room ends it. The show finds its subject in that gap between talent and control, and it gets there on the strength of its own pacing.

The performances carry a lot of the weight. Brosnahan plays Midge's early confidence and her final shock without overplaying either, Borstein gives Susie both the comedy and the exhaustion of Sophie's demands, and Sykes makes Moms Mabley's brief appearance feel like a rebuke to everyone in the room. Kirby's Lenny Bruce is warm in a way the show earns by keeping him sparing.

Not every thread lands. The Susie material in Vegas feels like filler next to the Sophie plot, and Joel's club story is a pleasant diversion more than a necessity. The Miss Julie scene is easily the cringiest moment of the season. But the Apollo ending is a strong ending that cuts against the show's usual comfort, and it changes what viewers expect from Midge going forward. Season 3 is worth watching to the end, even if the midpoint drags.

Reading the season as a pair of mirrors helps. Sophie wrecks her own big break because she cannot stop being the persona that made her rich. Midge loses hers because she kept performing the way that had always worked. Both falls come from an artist being unable to separate the person from the product, and the writing sets the two side by side on purpose. Season 3 is streaming on Prime Video.

Sources

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