A retro heroine for modern times
THE WRITERS BEHIND AMAZON’S new series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which is now streaming, set high expectations for their protagonist when they chose their title. Fortunately, the woman at the center of the show, a 1950s housewife turned stand-up comic in the vein of Joan Rivers named Midge Maisel, is indeed marvelous. In her first comedy routine, she jokes that she’s become a cliché—her husband has left her for his secretary—and ends the night flashing the crowd and being dragged off by the police. Every jab at an audience member or police officer is pulled off with irresistible self-assuredness and charm—qualities you might expect to see in Sam Malone or Jerry Seinfeld, but rarely find in a female lead.
The creator of Mrs. Maisel, Amy Sherman-Palladino, has a strong track record when it comes to bringing assertive women to the screen. For years, on her beloved prime-time hit Gilmore Girls, the mother-daughter duo of Lorelai and Rory chattered away with each other as they fearlessly took on the world: Rory went from bookish high schooler to journalist, Lorelai from young single mom to small business owner. Sherman-Palladino, along with her husband and Gilmore Girls collaborator Dan Palladino, have endowed Mrs. Maisel’s Midge with the same stubbornness and volubility that made Lorelai a fan favorite.
Sherman-Palladino shares these traits with her leading women. A decade after Gilmore Girls’ finale, she still maintains that she has not watched the episodes of Gilmore Girls that she did not write, and during the interview Palladino jokes that he has to check his wife’s pulse when she lets him answer a question without interjecting
This story is from the December 11,2017 edition of Time.
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This story is from the December 11,2017 edition of Time.
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