‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Earns Its Name in the Series Finale

This post contains spoilers for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s series finale. 

The four words that gave The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel its name weren’t uttered until the final act of the series finale. Bestowed upon Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge Maisel by Gordon Ford (Reid Scott) after a star-making set on his late-night TV show, the moniker became a symbol of an Upper West Side housewife choosing to become something more.

“Midge bought into an immature fantasy as a young woman, of house and husband and children and postcards and the right bench and temple and the brisket and ‘the rabbi’s coming, the rabbi is coming.’ That was the be-all, end-all for her,” cocreator Amy Sherman-Palladino told Vanity Fair. “And when she discovered this burning ambition in herself, something she didn’t even know was there, she followed it to the very end.”

Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, both real-life and creative partners, are well attuned to the power a show’s final season holds. The pair couldn’t end Gilmore Girls, the beloved series they created and shepherded for six seasons before exiting amidst behind-the-scenes drama, on their own terms. (Netflix’s 2016 revival series allowed them something of a do-over.) When I spoke to the pair, Succession had just killed off Logan Roy—though they practically put their fingers in their ears to resist spoilers. The weekly unfurling of Maisel’s final act caused its own brand of stress: “Every week I’ve got to up the Prozac,” Sherman-Palladino said. “Up the dosage, up the dosage, baby.”

The Palladinos, who spoke to VF prior to the ongoing writers strike, talked about ending Maisel in a tight five—from tackling Lenny Bruce’s death to dreaming up Midge’s star-studded future.

Vanity Fair: Much of the season is framed with flash-forwards into Midge’s fame and the ramifications it had on her children. How did you pick which snippets we’d see?

Daniel Palladino: It was an idea that we had flirted with since season two. We tried something too early, so we felt like we should save it for the last season. Picking and choosing them was just really trial and error. We didn’t want to overdo it, except in episode six, “The Testi-Roastial,” where we did flashbacks within flashbacks.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: We had so much story to get into this season because we needed to wrap everybody up. It really became, what is the big punch? Because you could think of a bunch of funny flash-forwards that would be entertaining to watch—but what is the story punch? That automatically weeded a few things out. And then a couple got weeded out by the fact that we just did not have enough days. We tried to control time, and they wouldn’t let us do that.

Palladino: In a nine-episode season, we tend to come up with 11 episodes of stuff, and then we try to pound them into [the allotted number] or we start eliminating. It’s inevitable.

How much of Midge’s future that we don’t see have you filled in for yourselves? I’m assuming you know the identities of all her husbands.

Sherman-Palladino: We know who the husbands were. 

Palladino: Approximately. We were strongly implying that Robert Evans was one of her husbands. We implied that Quincy Jones cheated on Peggy Lipton at some point, but it’s fiction—

Sherman-Palladino: We didn’t say marriage. He didn’t put a ring on it.

Palladino: One of the things we were flirting with was seeing her with her husband later in life, and that was on the board until the very, very last second.

Sherman-Palladino: We wanted to show Midge and Joel much later in life—that they both have significant others off in the background, but they were only concerned about each other, and just wanted to hang with each other. They were always going to be this couple, whether or not they were with other people. That was the one sequence we couldn’t figure out how to fit into the schedule. It was just too many days and locations. But we put the picture [of the two of them] in the last episode, and the picture basically did the same thing. The man who’s on her vanity table that she says goodnight to every night is the man that she couldn’t be with. So sometimes, those things become happy accidents.