What's So Marvelous About Mrs. Maisel?
How Pilots Make Their Characters So Charismatic
Welcome to (what I presume will be) the first installment of Blaise’s Story Booth! If you’re reading this, that means you’ve made the grave error of subscribing to my echo chamber, and it’s too late to back out now! I hope you enjoy nerdy ramblings about story structure, because that’s what you’re in for.
So, full disclosure: I love television!
I’m not alone in that statement, considering television is, like, one of the three most popular things there is (next to chocolate and having money, I think). But I love television to an annoying degree. I mean, I went to school in New York City to study TV writing, for Christ’s sake. Well, that was part of the reason I went to school in New York City. The other reason was because I wanted to live inside the world of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
I watched The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel after season one dropped in 2017. I remember downloading the first three episodes for a long flight, and by the halfway point in my journey, I was out of episodes and desperately wanted more. It immediately grabbed me, even though there was no methamphetamine or dragons, instead just funny Jewish people.
So, when considering a pilot episode to examine for my very first article on this Substack, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel came to mind pretty quickly, because I think it has a strength that, frankly, not many pilots do: Character.
In my own experience as a writer, particularly writing pilots, characters are hard to write. Especially main characters, my god, I cannot count the number of scripts I’ve read with incredibly fleshed-out casts… aside from the protagonist. One of my old teachers theorized it’s because the main characters are always closest to ourselves, and therefore harder to understand, which may be true, but I always chock it up to there being more pressure to get them Exactly Right.
If The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel showcases any strength right up top, it’s how well it introduces its main character, reveals the problems in her universe, and then, like any good pilot, blows it all up and forces her to build something new. So, I’m gonna take us through the first episode of the show, aptly titled “Pilot,” and examine what makes Midge such a great, but more importantly, likable character, and how by the end of the episode, we’ve readied her for a series’ worth of trouble. But first…
… What Is A Character?
All of us know who characters are, but it’s probably difficult for most of us to articulate what exactly makes them so fascinating to watch. Fortunately, this is far from an original thought, which brings us to the pick-up line that I keep using in the hopes that someday it’ll work on a woman: Let’s talk about Aristotle!
One of the earliest surviving texts on story theory is Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the philosopher originated many modern-day fundamentals of art, theater, and storytelling. For a work of story analysis that predates the birth of Christ, it’s still relevant to how we deconstruct narrative today, and back then, the Greeks didn’t even really understand what the Sun was.
The section of Poetics I want to draw attention to in particular is Chapter XV, in which Aristotle outlines what it is that makes characters essential to poetic drama. Among the qualities Aristotle emphasizes in a strong Character, I want to specifically highlight two: morality and consistency.
On morality, Aristotle writes:
First, and most important, [Character] must be good. Now any speech or action that manifests moral purpose of any kind will be expressive of character: the character will be good if the purpose is good.
And on consistency:
… for though the subject of the imitation, who suggested the type, be inconsistent, still he must be consistently inconsistent.
So, to briefly summarize Aristotle’s thoughts, he believed Characters have to lie somewhere on a moral compass and they must be consistent in their characterization, meaning that a person who acts good must always act good, and never act bad unless they have a reason to as a result of the plot.
But Aristotle didn’t know everything, despite what historians might lead you to believe. Another way of analyzing characters, specifically their motivations, is charted by this complex graph I found on the Internet:
Traditionally, there are three things that motivate characters: their wants, their needs, and their fears. Particularly, the dichotomy between these three is what drives story. Characters want something specific, even though it might not be what they need, which forces them to confront something they’re afraid of. Characters’ wants/needs/fears also vary based on level of awareness. Sometimes, characters have conscious fears (see: Indiana Jones’ fear of snakes), other times, they have unconscious fears (see: Indiana Jones’ fear of losing Marion). The interplay between these is where we get dramatic moments, when characters realize something is a want or need or fear.
Thankfully, we see a lot of these elements about Character in motion during the very first scene of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. In only a few minutes, we learn about Midge’s sense of morality, the consistency of her nature, her wants, her needs, and her fears. So… what are they?
Meeting Midge
There’s a lot of story crammed into the first scene of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, with a lot of cutting back and forth between the past and present. Before we even get a look at Rachel Brosnahan in a wedding dress, we hear the character’s voice over blackness: “Who gives a toast at her own wedding?” Once we finally see her, the character launches into her first of many monologues, where we learn our first fact about the titular marvel: she likes to talk.
This will become important for obvious reasons later, but for now, Miriam “Midge” Maisel (née Weissman) is taking the spotlight at her own wedding to tell the guests (and, by proxy, the audience) how meticulously planned her life is, and how that plan led her to the groom with whom she shares her new last name: Joel Maisel. If there’s such a thing as type-AAA, Midge would be it, as within two minutes, we’re flashing back to her days as a freshman girl at Bryn Mawr University.
But, as Midge tells the origins of her romance with Joel, there’s an increasing sense that this “perfect” love story is… somewhat fabricated. The flashbacks play a major role here as Midge’s speech is juxtaposed against the reality of her college life; while she tells the wedding guests that Joel took her to galleries and poetry readings, in actuality, he took her to strip joints to see Lenny Bruce. Afterwards, Midge and Joel have awkward sex against a tree while she admires her shiny new engagement ring. It’s not that the love story isn’t real, Midge is just prone to making it seem more squeaky-clean than it really was.
The wedding guests are none the wiser about who Midge and Joel really are, until Midge ends her speech by jokingly telling the mostly-orthodox crowd that there’s shrimp in the eggrolls. The entire reception erupts into immediate chaos and Midge and Joel stare at each other lovingly. So, maybe they have some idea.
In a scene that spans seven-and-a-half pages of the pilot script, we learn everything we need to about the Character of Midge Maisel.
What does she want? Consciously, she wants to live the perfect life married to the perfect man, but unconsciously, she wants to live an edgier life than she might really let on.
What does she need? This is tricky, because on the surface, it might appear that Midge already has everything she needs, but as we’ll later learn in the pilot, she’s more trapped in this life she’s carved for herself than she realizes.
What does she fear? Pretty self-explanatory, but someone whose life is as meticulously planned out and perfect as Midge is going to fear losing it all, which, spoiler alert, she will.
So, now that we’ve properly met Miriam Maisel and gotten a good sense for who she is, what she wants out of life, and what she’s afraid of getting, the pilot flashes us forward four years, to the days leading up to Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Judaism, where we’ll start to see how Midge’s world challenges those wants/needs/fears we saw in the teaser.
New York, New York
A large amount of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel takes place in the Upper West Side of New York City, where Midge and Joel raise two children in the same apartment building as her parents. Joel works an office job at his father’s company, while Midge spends her days running routines that, at the moment, seems too good to be true.
But idyllic lives don’t challenge Character, Arenas challenge Character. Calling a Character’s world their “Arena” doesn’t mean they have to pick up a mace and fight lions, but their wants and fears need to be uniquely tested, ideally in ways that reveal cracks in their life waiting to burst.
So, we spend a day in the life of Miriam Maisel. Which, for the most part, is a great opportunity to showcase Brosnahan’s future Emmy-winning performance. But don’t be charmed just yet - what’s happening in the next 15 or so pages is vital to establishing the Status Quo of Midge and Joel’s life. (For more on the “Status Quo” and Three-Act Story Structure, stay tuned for my next article, which is a doozy).
During a visit to the deli, we learn that Midge has secured the rabbi to attend their family’s Yom Kippur meal, after years of atoning for her shrimp joke at the wedding. Right off the bat, we get the sense that Midge’s rebelliousness and perhaps crude tastes make her somewhat ostracized from their community despite being upper-middle class. Even her conversation with the deli owner elicits shocked reactions from fellow patrons, showing that Midge’s attitude is not appropriate even in late 1950s New York City.
Later, Joel vents on the phone to her about not getting a good time slot at the club. As it turns out, their visits to see Lenny Bruce have inspired Joel to pick up a hobby of performing stand-up comedy at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village (a far cry from the color and wealth of the Upper West Side), but Midge is all too familiar with this routine by now: Joel gets a bad time slot, Midge has a brisket ready for the owner, Baz, to change his mind. Despite the hostility of Baz’s employee Susie, it works, and Joel goes on stage to kill while Midge notes what he can improve for next time. The only problem so far? Susie is in the corner, scowling at Joel’s act, which rubs Midge the wrong way.
At night, Joel falls asleep peacefully while Midge sneaks out of bed to wash her face, curl her hair, and apply nighttime creams before sneaking back into bed. Before Joel’s alarm goes off the next morning, Midge wakes up again, applying makeup and making sure Joel thinks she wakes up looking like that every morning. This is what I like to refer to as the first crack in the glass. As much as Midge and Joel seem to be in love… at least some of it is a facade, if Joel’s unaware how much work his wife is even putting into the way she looks for him.
Elsewhere during this section of the pilot, we meet some of the other characters who populate Joel and Midge’s life: Midge’s insecure mother Rose, her aloof father Abe, her children Ethan and Esther, Joel’s smarmy co-worker Archie and his wife Imogene, and Joel’s dim-witted secretary Penny. One of my favorite scenes from the pilot, and perhaps one of the most telling about the way Midge grew up, is when Rose takes her to see the baby Esther (the parents spend more time watching Midge’s kids than Midge or Joel do, frankly) worried that her forehead is too large, but when Midge tries to reassure her, Rose says, “I just want her to be happy. It’s easier to be happy when you’re pretty.”
Thankfully, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has a talented enough cast that, if the rest of the show was just the daily ins-and-outs of these characters’ lives, it’d still be entertaining. However, what goes up must come down, and soon enough Midge’s life will come down quite hard.
The Moment Where Everything Changes
What’s the difference between plot and story? Plot, as we understand it, is a series of events happening in succession. Story, on the other hand, is a plot which involves dramatic stakes and change. When we differentiate the two, there’s one aspect of stories we try to hone in on: why is this happening now?
You wouldn’t write a show in which characters live their perfect lives for five episodes before anything happens to disrupt it. You’d get bored by the first ten minutes of episode 1. It’s important that stories, especially pilots, reveal as quickly as possible why everything is going to change for these characters. Think of some iconic pilots: in Breaking Bad, Walter White is diagnosed with cancer and begins cooking meth to provide for his family. In Lost, a plane crash strands a group of strangers on an island that’s home to mysterious entities. In The Good Place, Eleanor realizes that she’s been sent to heaven by mistake, forcing her to adapt to living amongst society’s best people.
For Midge, her turning point might seem abrupt, but the audience can piece together the clues early on. One night, Midge watches a Bob Hope appearance on late-night TV that’s word-for-word Joel’s act from the Gaslight the other night. She initially presumes that Joel’s act was stolen, until her husband nonchalantly confirms the opposite: not only did he steal Bob Hope’s act, but everybody in comedy does it when they’re starting out. Thus explaining Susie’s eye-rolling at his performance earlier in the episode.
So during their next visit to the Gaslight, Midge encourages Joel to try a joke of his own, or rather, a joke she comes up with for him in the cab addressing the holes in his show sweater. Only this time, the stakes are higher: Joel’s co-worker Archie and his wife are coming to the show, and this is their first opportunity to see the burgeoning comic in the flesh. Predictably, it’s disaster after disaster; Baz isn’t there to accept the brisket, resulting in Susie putting Joel on late out of spite. When Joel finally goes up, Midge’s joke for him bombs and he stumbles through his ripped-off Bob Hope routine.
Midge and Joel return home in silence, and later that night, she finds Joel packing a suitcase. Midge, still in denial that her perfect life can fall apart, reminds him that Yom Kippur is tomorrow, and the rabbi will be coming over, but Joel’s too focused on how bad of a show it was, and Midge lets it slip that she never thought he was serious about comedy anyway.
Boom. Marriage over.
I don’t want to breeze over it, but this scene between Midge and Joel (pages 44-50 in the pilot script) is one of the best pilot moments in the history of television, in my humble opinion. It’s as funny as it is heartbreaking, especially with moments like:
Joel: Did you ever think you were supposed to be something and then you suddenly realized you’re not?
Midge: Yes. Married.
Despite Midge’s pleas for Joel to stay, the truth ends up coming out one way or another: he’s having an affair. To make matters worse, it’s with his secretary, the ultimate blow to Midge’s pride, as well as her intelligence. In one swift moment, this couple goes from nuclear family to… well, nuclear family.
Midge’s parents aren’t any emotional solace, to rub salt on the wound. Rose is hysterical, while Abe tells Midge that, even though he never liked Joel, it is her duty as his wife and the mother of his children to get him back. It’s not exactly the comforting conversation Midge wants to hear right after finding out that Joel is leaving her for a woman named Penny Pan. So, Midge does the only thing that makes sense for her, or any human being, in that moment: drink.
What Does Midge Need Now?
We’ve all had that moment where we ride the subway with a bottle of wine in hand and end up at a comedy club in the middle of the night… haven’t we?
It doesn’t take long for Midge to completely spiral after her breakup with Joel, and we can’t blame her. In one scene, her worst fear has materialized: she’s lost the perfect life she always wanted, all because she couldn’t live up to the impossible expectations of the people around her, from Joel to her parents. So it’s all the more appropriate that she ends up traveling all the way down to Greenwich Village and returning to the Gaslight in order to retrieve her Pyrex, which she left behind with the brisket earlier in the night. The Pyrex here sort of symbolizes the last bit of her marriage with Joel left over, their routine that minutes earlier seemed good enough to last a lifetime. Midge might’ve lost Joel, but she sure as hell won’t lose that Pyrex.
But while Midge doesn’t get her Pyrex back, this integral scene of the pilot is where we learn her true need: honesty. From the very first moment of this series, Midge has been lying, either to herself (it’s fine for Joel to be stealing jokes!), or by omission (her carefully-worded wedding speech), or just for shits and giggles (the infamous shrimp debacle). So, disillusioned by Joel’s broken dreams of stand-up comedy, Midge strolls onto the stage and does what she does best, albeit accidentally: she commands attention.
Just rewatching this scene, I’m struck by a few very strong feelings every time:
This is really the first moment in the entire pilot where Midge’s interior is on full display. Her exterior also is on display right at the end, but what I mean is that the woman on this stage, albeit drunk and a little manic, is the most true version of Midge anyone has seen. This is who this character is. She’s witty, she’s smart, she’s petty, she’s delusional, she’s angry, she’s dirty, she’s heartbroken, she’s marvelous.
Midge is a natural at this. More so than Joel ever was, even when he killed. You can see it on Susie’s face as the past-midnight crowd at the Gaslight livens up. One of my favorite moments is when Midge fully leans into spilling her guts for this audience, grabbing the mic, and posturing, “So, my life completely fell apart today! Did I mention that my husband left me?” Even back at her wedding, Midge knows that this is where she excels.
Thank god for Rachel Brosnahan.
After baring it all (literally) for the crowd, Midge is dragged out by cops to a roaring audience, and thrown in the back of a police car, where she runs into, you guessed it, Lenny Bruce. As if to say, your transformation is complete. In the span of (roughly) an hour, we’ve seen the steady-and-then-all-at-once transition of Mrs. Maisel from idyllic 1950s housewife to, as she calls herself, the mad divorcee of the Upper West Side, sharing a backseat with one of the most prolific dirty comedians in the history of the art form.
But the episode’s still not over.
The Cost Of Being All Alone
What we’ve seen so far would make a great movie. It’s got all the right ingredients, doesn’t it? But this isn’t a movie, it’s a show, and shows need to tell the audience, Come back next week, there’s more. It’s not enough to just completely flip a switch on a character, we need the promise that this just the start of an evolution, a longer journey that will continue to test our Character.
Although each individual episode of a show obeys Three (or sometimes Four) Act Structure, I’ve often seen the pilot episode compared to an extension of the first few stages of the Hero’s Journey: the Ordinary World, the Call to Adventure, the Refusal of the Call, the Meeting of the Mentor, and the Crossing of the Threshold, with the rest of the series expanding on the Special World stages for as long as humanly possible.
After her lewd public meltdown in Greenwich Village, Midge is bailed out of prison by the last person she expects: Susie, the grumpy co-worker of Baz from the Gaslight. Susie takes her for a drink and pitches her on pursuing stand-up comedy professionally, though Midge isn’t interested. However, Susie makes a strong argument: she has only ever seen talent like Midge’s once before in her life, and she was right then, and she thinks she might be right now. But for Midge, this night was a one-time fluke.
By our Hero’s Journey analysis, this scene with Susie in the pilot is both the Refusal of the Call and Meeting of the Mentor. But it also contains what I believe is the most significant moment in the entire first episode of the show.
This will probably someday get its own article, but I call it this moment the “Emotional Thesis.” Oftentimes in movies or shows, especially in pilots, there is a specific line of dialogue which extrapolates the entire meaning of a show. To circle back to Breaking Bad mentioned earlier, there’s a moment in that pilot where Jesse asks Walts, pretty bluntly, “Why are you doing this?” and Walt responds, “I am awake.” It’s played for laughs in the moment, but it externalizes the entire conflict for the rest of the show: Walt’s not becoming a drug kingpin to support his family, he’s doing it because he wants to live before he dies.
In The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the entire series boils down to one line Susie says here, after admitting that if she doesn’t follow her gut on helping Midge become a comic, she’ll die alone. Midge tries to comfort her, but Susie shoots back:
Susie: It’s fine. I don’t mind being alone. I just don’t want to be... insignificant. Do you?
And right there. That question is the heart of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It is the powder keg that will drive Midge’s Character for the rest of the show. In one line of dialogue, it is the culmination of everything Midge wants, needs, and fears. And it’s no longer unconscious.
We can tell that this question is going to eat at Midge in the remaining moments of the pilot. Despite her refusal to let Susie help her, she shows up unannounced to her tiny apartment and says they’ll talk the next morning. She starts writing in the journal she used to take notes in for Joel’s comedy. She attends a meeting of Communists for the hell of it.
And finally, she returns to that police station and bails out Lenny Bruce, the first spark of what will be a series-long will-they-won’t-they. But for now, Midge just wants one thing out of Lenny: advice. Does he love stand-up comedy? In one of Luke Kirby’s many stand-out moments in the series, Lenny doesn’t bullshit her:
Lenny Bruce: [Let’s] put it like this - if there was anything else in the entire world that I could possibly do to earn a living - I would. Anything. I’m talking dry cleaners to the Klan, crippled-kid portrait painter, slaughterhouse attendant... If someone said to me, Leonard - you can either eat a guy’s head or do two weeks at the Copa, I’d say pass the fucking salt. It’s a terrible, terrible job. It should not exist. Like cancer and God.
Just then, Lenny’s wife shows up to take him home. But Midge doesn’t let him leave without a real answer:
Midge (calling after him): But do you love it?
Lenny Bruce stops, turns around and looks at her. He laughs, shakes his head and walks off hands in the air “I surrender”.
Midge: (to herself) Yeah. He loves it.
Lenny is the closest thing we have to a bad omen for Midge in this episode, especially when you know the man’s real-life fate. He point-black tells Midge, practically the audience, right at the end of the pilot: this job will eat you alive. But despite that, yes, he does love it.
So without further ado, a recap of what we’ve learned about Midge’s Character throughout this pilot. Let’s go back to some of those old tools we used up top.
Aristotle told us that Characters had morality and consistency. They stand somewhere on the spectrum of good to bad person, and they are consistent in that placement until they are forced to change. We learn pretty quickly that Midge operates in a fairly morally grey area. She values what she imagines a perfect life to be, strong womanhood, family dynamics, etc, but she gets a kick out of playing to her low-brow sensibilities, talking back to people, stirring up trouble. And when her perfect little life is pulled out from underneath her, she certainly shows it through the crudeness of her stage performance.
What does she want? Consciously, Midge thought she wanted a perfect life as a perfect wife, but after Joel leaves her and she tastes a future in stand-up comedy, Midge realizes she didn’t want a great love story, she wants to be significant.
What does she need? This still remains a tricky question to answer, because it’s pretty clear from Lenny’s monologue that Midge does not need stand-up comedy in her life. But stand-up comedy might provide her what she does need, which is honesty, to be herself and to take control of her life and of her narrative.
What does she fear? What is there to fear after your life falls apart? Well, earlier in the episode, Midge saw how Joel dealt with failure, and it’s the closest she came to terrified in the entire episode. If there’s any reason she’s going to take stand-up comedy seriously, it’s because she’s afraid of ending up like Joel.
Of all the many reasons to love The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I adore it for how Midge’s Character evolves from episode to episode. Within the 58 minutes that make up the show’s pilot episode, a lot happens to our titular heroine that would level any other human being, so it shows a lot of strength for her to take the journey she ultimately takes throughout the series. So, when I ask what makes a Character so charismatic or likable, it’s actually a very simple formula: we’re rooting for her. Sure, she might not be the best role model, or parent, or daughter, or wife, and she’s as flawed as any of us are in the real world, but regardless of that, we’re still rooting for her to win.
If you never watched The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel during its run, I highly recommend checking it out on Amazon! As for my thoughts on the rest of the series: seasons 1 and 2 are perfect, season 3 loses it way a little, season 4 is where it picks back up, and season 5 is a tremendous season to end on.
If you did watch all of Maisel like I have, maybe now’s the time to start a re-watch! Maybe it’ll inspire you to start a Substack and waste time writing an article about it.
For now, thanks for wasting your time with me,
Blaise Santi
or, The Marvelous Mr. Santi
You are marvelous!
VERY well said! I really gotta watch the fifth season. This got me excited to get back into it!