Here's Why 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' Has All Those Time Jumps In Season 5
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The technicolor time machine that is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is back in service for one last whirl. But instead of whisking viewers straight to New York in the 1960s—the time period in which the majority of the final season is set—the show begins its farewell tour with a pit stop in 1981, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
There, audiences meet adult Esther Maisel, now a PhD candidate at MIT. The first episode begins with Esther scrounging through her backpack in frantic pursuit of a ponytail holder, all the while complaining to her therapist about—what else?—her mother.
"It was a fun way to kick off the last season with a visual that isn't something that you would expect, and yet it was right on story," says The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. "Because our whole thing about Midge's journey is she made a choice. And when she made that choice, things fall by the wayside—love, family, stability, that stuff all goes away. What you get is the excitement. You get this wonderful adventure... and you have a life bigger than you would've thought, but all of the things that you thought just sort of come with being alive, that all sort of went to the side."
The opening scene with Esther detailing her fraught relationship with her mother hit home the overarching theme that "every choice comes with consequences," says Sherman-Palladino, because everything Esther talks about in her therapy session is "the direct result of the decision that she [Midge] made" when she became a stand-up comedian.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 5 features multiple time jumps.
The creative choice to begin the final season in 1981, rather than picking up where season four left off in 1961, likely surprised fans. But it wasn't long before the audience was thrown back into a simpler time, when late night talk shows were watched live and in full, rather than in YouTube clips shared in group texts or memed on social media the next morning.
After Esther's (brief) moment in the spotlight, the show rewinds to the morning after Lenny Bruce's Carnegie Hall performance. From there, the final season spends the majority of its time in 1961, chronicling the events that lead to Midge's big break. But, much like the road to success, the episodes' timeline is not linear.
Instead, strategically-placed oscillations between the past, present, and future occur. "We really wanted to keep [the time jumps] to a minimum. We didn't want a toy with the audience too much," says Palladino. "We wanted it to be something fun and special in the episodes that they [the time jumps] were in, and we wanted them to sort of either comment on the current action of the story, or for the current action to sort of reflect off of what they became."
Coming up with the order in which these time jumps appear required some "trial and error," he adds."As we went along, it just sort of came to fruition, and we knew there were certain points that we wanted to hit in their lives, and we wanted to tell those stories at certain times."
Midge's 60 Minutes special hints at her career highlights.
Episode two gives further glimpses into Midge's future. A fictional 60 Minutes special lays out a loose timeline of Midge's career highlights, including 18 consecutive sold-out nights at the Copacabana at age 30, her performances with Bob Hope for the troops in Vietnam, a "now-infamous" show at Carnegie Hall in 1971, four marriages, a guest-host spot for Johnny Carson, and a cameo in Mad, Mad World, to name a few. And—at some undisclosed point in her career—a rift occurs in Midge's "25-year friendship" with talent manager Susie Myerson.
To make the 60 Minutes special as authentic to the time period as possible, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel executive producer, writer, and director Dan Palladino watched Johnny Carson, Betty Davis, and Larry King's real-life specials "because those three were right in the era that we were recreating for Midge's," he says. "And we even stole a line from Larry King's [60 Minutes interview] where he says, 'Women, women and Larry King. What's up with that?'"
The show even replicated the "almost antagonistic attitude" of television interviewers at the time, says Sherman-Palladino. "Right off the bat, there didn't seem to be any, like, 'Let's play nice.' It was basically like, 'I'm gonna ask you about all the bullsh*t you don't wanna talk about, and you're gonna treat me with incredible disdain.'"
Those real-life interviews not only informed how Dan Palladino wrote that part of the episode, but how the Maisel team shot and edited it. They wanted to emulate this "very specific way" of filming where "they tended not to cut away from the subject," says Palladino.
The show was never meant to be a time capsule, though.
Though The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel could easily take on a quaintness of yesteryear, Sherman-Palladino and Palladino were painstakingly purposeful in how they portrayed a narrative so rooted in a specific time and place that could still resonate with today's audiences.
"We told everybody from the time we were talking to people about doing the pilot that we wanted this to be a colorful show; we didn't want it to feel like a time capsule," Palladino says. "So we said to our DP [director of photography] that we didn't want this to have any kind of sepia tone... We wanted it to feel modern."
"And New York was, actually [at that time]," adds Sherman-Palladino. "If you look at old pictures—between the signage and the posters and the clothes and the cars and the appliances—color was big. It was color and vibrancy and energy, because it was all about building a new America." (If the Maisel-verse ever needs a political or, more likely, Emmys campaign slogan, might I suggest #MakeAmericaMarvelousAgain?)
The lackluster hues of TV dinners aside, the 1950s and 1960s were "all very much new and bright and different," according to Sherman-Palladino. "Because of that," she continues, "when our production designer went into doing his research and when Donna [Zakowska], the costume designer, goes into doing her research, they are drawn to colors that mean something. They're using color palettes of the time."
Beyond the nuts and bolts of not simply re-creating, but rather reimagining, many a bygone era, Sherman-Palladino and Palladino still have a story to tell.
After multiple award-winning seasons, it now seems almost inevitable that the show taking place in the middle of the 20th century proved a uniquely perfect place for Midge Maisel, an Upper West Side housewife/mother, to reinvent herself as a downtown stand-up comedian. Of course, it was. How could it have been anywhen else?
"It was a time when women weren't doing the sort of things that Midge had decided to do—the change that she puts herself through, and the change that sort of reverberates out onto everybody else," says Sherman-Palladino. "...If you're a great stand-up comic, you are getting out there and you are saying, 'This is my story, these are my faults, these are my failings.' And your failings often mean you're gonna talk about your family or your kids, and then suddenly, they are fodder for your act. But without that, there's no honesty, there's no truth, there's no story."
For Midge to become not just a good stand-up comic, but one of the greats, she defies her time and continues to defy it decade after decade, no matter the cost (of Esther's therapy sessions, among other things).
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