“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and the Resurrection and Redemption of Our Fathers
By Kat Spada
NB: This essay contains spoilers for the last two episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
“Should we save it?” I asked my partner, upon realizing that the episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which we were about to watch, was the series finale.
“I don’t know what we’d save it for,” he replied understandably, and neither did I, really. I suppose because it was late I thought it might be nice to watch it earlier another evening with fresh eyes, but I, too, was eager to see the denouement of Midge Maisel’s rise to comedy stardom in Amy Sherman-Palladino’s highly-stylized homage to New York in the 1960s.
Over the years, the show’s storylines had peaks and valleys, despite being a consistently best-in-class accomplishment of makeup, hairstyling, and costume and production design, At times, characters were insufferably grating or acted out of motivations that strained credulity — even for a decades-long viewer of the verbose output from Amy Sherman-Palladino’s production company (itself named in honor of Dorothy Parker). But in its last season, with jumps to different time periods and a deeper exploration of how the series’ core relationships would persist throughout the characters’ lives, my anticipation of each week’s new episode only grew.
When the final credits rolled, title cards laid over candy-colored scenery from the show’s five seasons — the Maisels’ kitchen, the Gaslight Café, manager Susie Myerson’s cramped apartment as big as a Murphy bed — I wept, realizing why I’d had the sudden urge an hour prior to postpone the conclusion of this lauded series.
A familiar moment came as my partner realized that my tears were transitioning from the appreciative sniffles of a satisfying outcome for the characters onscreen to a real shoulder-shaking sob for something much deeper. He was surprised to see me so moved by the end of the show, but in truth my emotional response came from another source. As occasionally happens in the years following a death, grief reemerges fresh as a crocus, giving the impression that the deceased has been taken all over again, as something that bridged their time on earth and their time elsewhere follows their footsteps into memory.
“My dad loved this show,” I finally uttered, feeling somehow bashful about admitting it. When he was alive, I don’t think I ever watched an episode without him. My dad, Phil, was ill off and on for many years, and we loved watching TV together. In hindsight, that feels so banal and obvious. But with so much time spent recuperating, or resting, or tethered to an oxygen concentrator, what else were we going to do? One of our favorite prestige dramas during his last year of life was Craig Mazin’s Chernobyl, but our shared interests ranged from The Amazing Race to Reno 911! reruns, and everything in between.
It occurs to me now, after the Maisel conclusion left me in such a state of mourning, why I never caught up on the last two seasons of Better Call Saul. When it returned to broadcast after a two-year hiatus, so much had changed in my life and in the world, and I was no longer making weekly (or more) visits to my parents’ house to help out and catch up on our favorite shows. But The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was different; even watching it by myself, I could feel my dad reflected in the characters and setting.
Rachel Brosnahan plays Midge Maisel, a character roughly ten years older than my father. While the Weissmans and Maisels are living through the events of the first few seasons of the show, navigating society on the Upper West Side and comedy shows in Greenwich Village, my dad would have been a teenager about a hundred miles upstate, working as a milkman in the mornings and a waiter at a Jewish resort in the summers. Like Brosnahan, my dad was not Jewish; he was Italian and Ukrainian, sharing some Eastern European heritage and culture (especially culinary preferences) with most of the resort clientele, where he claimed to have picked up his commonly-used Yiddish words and phrases.
In 1960, Dad moved from his small village in the Catskills to Brooklyn, where he attended Pratt Institute. I have countless memories of him telling stories about this time. He had so little money that he often subsisted on liverwurst sandwiches on pumpernickel from the automat. Or the time he took his seat in a dark movie theater, awakening a stray cat sleeping on the chair, and scared “the bejesus” out of himself. Other unconfirmed tales verged on the apocryphal, like witnessing crowds of Beatles fans outside of Ed Sullivan’s studio, or living in the same building as Truman Capote did (or had, previously? It’s hard to remember which version I was told).
Dad moved away from the Northeast not long after his graduation from Pratt, lured by The Beach Boys and the sunshine spilling out of Laurel Canyon through records spun across the country. New York transplants in L.A. are far from unique, but for his Angeleno native wife and daughters, stories about life “back east” often revolved around food. Dad would reminisce about decades long past while making matzo brei, or when finding the strange, delicious Cel-Ray soda at a deli somewhere. When he was sick, I’d look through his mother Vera’s mid-century cookbooks and make him a comforting treat from his youth, like kasha varnishkes, or pineapple upside-down cake.
Amy Sherman-Palladino’s previous series often highlight the relationships between mothers and daughters, with characters referencing her own mother, dancer Maybin Hughes. A 2017 New York Times profile revealed new context for my connection to my dad through Sherman-Palladino’s opus: the snappily-written and impeccably-designed world of Midge Maisel.
“‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ is in some ways a tribute to Ms. Sherman-Palladino’s father, Don Sherman, a comedian and writer who died five years ago,” writes the Times’ Alexis Soloski. “Growing up in the San Fernando Valley of California, Ms. Sherman-Palladino used to listen to him and his friends trading jokes in the backyard, absorbing the rhythms and tones as they tried to make one another laugh. … Her Bronx-born dad had made his start in the early ’60s in Greenwich Village basket houses (so-called because performers worked for tips tossed into passed baskets), a time and a scene Ms. Sherman-Palladino long envied.”
I don’t know what kind of relationship Don Sherman had with his daughter, as she left dancing behind to become a successful television writer. But I do know that in the final episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, she gave particular closure to the relationship between Midge and her father Abe, played by Tony Shalhoub. After a lifetime spent befuddled by his wife and daughter, Abe’s eyes are opened to a new possibility of how he can see the women in his life as complete people. When he discovers that his young granddaughter Esther is a budding genius, the child who can follow in his footsteps as an obsessed academic, he begins to relate to the world differently.
Following this, in the series’ penultimate episode, Abe realizes how all his self-aggrandizing had masked an intellect that was, in reality, small-minded. In a protracted scene among his male friends, talking about the lightning pace of societal changes they’ve lived through as men born in the previous century, before world wars and women’s suffrage, Abe gives the following speech:
“Everything I thought about the roles of men and women, I think is completely wrong. I have done exactly the wrong thing for both my children. … My daughter — My daughter was dumped by her husband, out of nowhere. … Instead of collapsing from the weight, she emerged stronger. A new person, so I thought. But now I think, perhaps that was who she was all along. I never really took her seriously. My son Noah I took seriously. I would take him to Columbia with me every week so he could dream of what he could be. I don’t remember if I ever did that for Miriam. I don’t think it ever occurred to me. And as unfathomable as this career choice of hers is, she’s doing it on her own. With no help from me or her mother. Where did this come from? This strength, this fearlessness that — that I never had. That my poor son never had. What could she have been if I had helped her and not ignored her? Ignored who she really is? My daughter is a remarkable person, and I don’t think I’ve ever said that to her.”
This effusiveness about his marvelous daughter is delivered passionately by Shalhoub, but not to her. It’s at once elegiac, reflecting on a death of self that took him decades of fatherhood to finally achieve, and a paean to his newfound hero, of whom he is too much in awe to express any of this directly. In the final episode, upon learning of the news that his daughter’s hard-fought “big break” is finally about to materialize, he’s economical with his praise.
“This is — really wonderful.”
“Thank you, Papa.”
Maybe Amy Sherman-Palladino had a lifetime of support and encouragement from her father. Maybe, just like mine, her dad sat her down when she was a little girl and told her that life might be harder for her sometimes, because she was very smart, and that throughout her life, boys and men would be intimidated by that and not value her intelligence. Maybe, like Phil did for me, Don’s the one who taught her about Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, while telling her that she could be a writer someday. Maybe he said everything his daughter needed him to say to her while he was still alive. Maybe, even with all of that, there remained differences unresolved, hurts that still cuts deep years after death. Or maybe, she needed to put these words into Midge’s father’s mouth in order to hear them at all.
Later in the finale, Abe is seated among the crowd of the live studio audience about to witness his daughter’s small-screen debut. Bolstered by its energy, eyes glistening, he is able to share somewhat more generously: “Miriam, I have to say — though not a word of any note has come out of your mouth — it is still very exciting to see you sitting on that stool.”
Midge responds to Abe, repeating words that I can only imagine Sherman-Palladino wishes she could say once more to her father, and which I will continue to utter in my dad’s memory for the rest of my life.
“Thank you, Papa.”
Kat Spada is a writer, storyteller, and L.A. native who hosts the media criticism podcast Feminist Frequency Radio and the “Beverly Hills 90210” podcast The Blaze with Lizzie and Kat. Follow her on Twitter.
