The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (4.4) Episode Recap: Starting to Spin the Wheels

For the past few episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I have been following other writing about the show, like Alan Sepinwall from Rolling Stone. His read on the season hasn’t been totally dissimilar regarding the overall stasis of plot and the act of restarting, but his feelings about it have been different. Sepinwall wrote about how the show felt like it was spinning its wheels. I recognized that it certainly felt as though the show hit a reset button going into the season with making Midge start over from square one (ish) with her need to book smalltime gigs, live in the same apartment, and largely interact with the same people. But I didn’t immediately view that as a negative. The dialogue has been sharp and funny as ever. Alex Borstein, Tony Shalhoub, and Marin Hinkle are getting more room to grow in their respective characters. Now we come to episode four, and I get it.

It’s not that this episode wasn’t fun or there weren’t fun or interesting moments, but there just wasn’t much direction in this episode. The Asher-Abe-Rose triangle is a fine and fun storyline but it just doesn’t go much of anywhere. Maybe establishing Abe and Asher’s relationship further ends up being worth it down the line, but it feels like a peculiar choice in an eight-episode season. The more the season progresses, the more important that context becomes. Halfway through the season and the most substantial things to happen so far are Susie getting her own office to grow her agency, Midge becoming the comedian/entertainer/host at a strip club, and Abe leaning into his writing and Rose into her matchmaking. I suppose Joel’s experiences at the club may be worth talking about, but the most substantial part of his story is predicated on breaking it to his parents that he is dating Mei. On their faces, none of these are done poorly. The writing itself, particularly the dialogue, is not lacking. The problem is in the way it’s written. The pacing of the season feels like a season of Gilmore Girls. It’s written with the pacing of a 24-episode network television show. But this season has eight episodes. When the credits roll on this episode, you are halfway through the season. Storylines with Abe, Miriam, Joel, and even Rose to an extent feel like they are treading water at this point in the season. Amy Palladino, Daniel Sherman-Palladino, and the rest of their creative team seems to be trying out storylines to see if they go anywhere. When that happened in Gilmore Girls, it made sense. They were exploring the characters the way we were getting to know them. They had time to pick up and drop mundane and insubstantial parts of the story. This format doesn’t really afford that, at least not always.

What feels different in the early part of this season, and in this fourth episode in particular, is that The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has rarely ever had a pacing problem. The writing has been remarkably sharp season-over-season. There’s no reason to think that the directional stasis of the show will continue, but it leaves me quite curious about how this season ends over these last four episodes. Maybe that’s the point, because I am definitely on the hook to see how this develops with just four episodes left in the season.

All of this being said certainly didn’t stop this episode from having a number of great jokes. My favorite of which came early in the episode from the terrific Tony Shalhoub:

It’s quite apropos that my favorite joke from this week plays on the importance moving forward, because on we move to episode five.