Day 4: #1000wordsofsummer
Finishing a Finale
Warning: Spoilers for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel abound!
The series finale of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is one of my favorite episodes of television.
My mom practically dragged me kicking and screaming to watch the show when it debuted back in 2017. As a twenty-something in the 2010s, a show about housewife in the 1950s appealed to me about as much as going to the DMV, but she got her hooks in when I went home for a visit and we binged that first season in a weekend.
Midge is the perfect wife with the perfect life when first episode begins, but her husband Joel unceremoniously leaves her by the episode’s end after she falls just short of perfect. Thank goodness he does because his abandonment is the push that gets her on a stage to spin her pain into pure comedic gold.
That’s the moment I started paying attention.
Then, a couple episodes later, he crawls back and asks for another shot.
That’s the moment I really started paying attention.
She could have played it safe and kept her small life. She could have given up when she got arrested or bumped from a major tour or blacklisted in the business or when her parents were embarrassed of her job.
Early in the finale of the final season, we see her kids all grown up. They each resent her in their own ways. She was gone a lot. She was a complicated woman who had the audacity to talk about herself beneath a spotlight instead of staying home and tucking in them in every night. She’s selfish. No more selfish than Abe was when he holed up in his office grading papers or when Joel was knocking back cocktails after hours with his secretary, but still, selfish. And I love it.
I still rewatch her final set when I need a pick me up.
She made me realize that I run into the biggest blocks in my writing—in my life—when I focus on the wrong audience. It’s a generic thing I’ve heard a million times and repeated a dozen—to be a writer you have to know your audience. But the thing that ruins my writing—and life—is worrying about what people outside of my audience think. It wastes so much energy and time. People respect traditional. People respect safe. It’s harder to gossip about people when they follow the script.
Actually, she’s not selfish. Selfish would have been going back to her safe life and making everyone around her miserable. Selfish would have been pushing herself back into the mold that she knew she’d outgrown.
Midge and Joel get back together at some point in the future. We don’t see the moment of reconciliation—only through brief context clues—but through the series we see him slowly accept that she’ll never be the naive college girl he fell in love with again but grows to love her not in spite of her selfishness, but respects her because of it. More importantly, she earns the big life she once dreamed of because she refused to let any knock down be a knockout.