The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season Four Review: A Myopic Portrayal of Redemption

Early on in the fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) moves back into the apartment where she once lived with her ex-husband, Joel (Michael Zegen). Desperate to redecorate away the memories of her marriage and its dissolution, she renders their old bedroom unrecognizable, with her bed an island in the center and furniture strewn around it at odd angles. “I was hurt here,” Midge explains to her friend Imogene (Bailey De Young) before banging her knee on a side table. “I know! Twice! Shin, toe…” Imogene responds, counting Midge’s bruises. The series likewise spends most of the two episodes made available to press stubbing its toes on scenes we’ve seen before.

The third season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ended with Midge booted from her biggest break yet after outing singer Shy Baldwin in her opening comedy set, which she still insists was hilarious. And though much of the new episodes focus on the fallout from that disaster, Midge seems unrepentant and uninterested in self-reflection. And why should she be? If the prior season brought Midge in close proximity to Black queerness and her own ignorance, season four plops her right back in her comfort zone, in the homogenous Upper West Side.

It’s an unintentional irony that the first episode of the new season, “Rumble on the Wonder Wheel,” ends with the voice of Leslie Uggams singing “Being Good,” a song (from the musical Hallelujah, Baby!) about a Black singer struggling against the societal barriers that hold back her professional success. Even the soundtrack shares Midge’s myopia.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel seems content to dedicate episodic arcs to sagas like that of the local milkman who won’t restore Midge’s tab from when she last lived in the neighborhood. The series tries to have it both ways: Midge is overwhelmed by her sudden need to pinch pennies, but the camera still luxuriates, untroubled, in the palacial aesthetics of her apartment. The lens should be focused on restoring her conscience, not her wallet.

And Midge’s stand-up routines seem to have been reduced to a string of f-bombs. If Midge isn’t sympathetic and her act isn’t funny, what’s to root for? “I wanna be me every time I walk on stage,” she tells her manager, Susie (the indefatigable Alex Borstein), as if launching a new phase of her career. But this is the same character who was arrested in the pilot for flashing the audience: Mrs. Maisel has never really had a problem being unapologetically herself.

The rest of the cast—including Tony Shalhoub as Midge’s perpetually incredulous father and Caroline Aaron as her increasingly outlandish ex-mother-in-law—bring their familiar gusts of energy to the proceedings. There’s not many new jokes to be found in the repetitive chaos of these relationships though. Instead, it’s unpredictable environments, as in a successfully silly scene in the first episode involving the whole family and ex-family shouting at each other from one Ferris wheel pod to the other, that provide the best setup for the laughs.

The plotline that seems freshest so far this season is the evolution of Joel’s fling with the sardonic Mei (Stephanie Hsu), the mysterious liaison to the illegal establishment in the basement of his Chinatown nightclub. When Joel asks Mei why the proprietors downstairs were so certain that he’d fail, she responds with caustically charming candor: “‘Cause you’re a Jewish ex-plastic salesman who suddenly opened a club in Chinatown with an English-to-Chinese dictionary from the 1880s.” The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has yet to reveal how Joel’s family will react to his intercultural romance. But should Mei become the second Mrs. Maisel, perhaps she should get a brighter spotlight of her own.