The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel kicks right off

[Jin Wah]

The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is returning with its 4th season after a two-year hiatus owing partly to the pandemic throwing shooting schedules off-kilter. “Revenge,” proclaims Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) right at the start, with smoke swirling around. It’s soon clear that the show, true to its nature, is picking up right where it left off in season 3.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 4 Episode 1
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 4 Premiere
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 4 Episode 1 Premiere
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 4 Amazon

The fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel kicks right off from where the explosive season three finale ended. In the third season, we saw Midge (Brosnahan) finally finding herself building a career in comedy by going on tours and even bagging herself a major deal with Shy Baldwin. Although after running her mouth a tad too wild at the Apollo theatre and at the risk of outing Baldwin's queer identity, Midge gets dropped from the tour. An unapologetic Midge returns in season 4, hurt and full of revenge feelings on being dropped from one of the biggest opportunities of her career. What seems strange though is that Midge still seems to have the same way of reacting to things like before. Mrs. Maisel seems to handle the rejection from Baldwin, the same way that she does when it comes to her divorce from Joel (Michael Zegen). She takes the stage and vents her heart out.

Considering what we have been through in the past two years, 2019 strangely seems like a different time. To think that the third season of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel premiered its third season in December 2019, at a time when we were yet to realise we were in the middle of the pandemic, seems weird. Although having followed the show up until now, I do believe it would have been hilarious the kind of sets Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) would have come up with had she been holed up in her Queens apartment amid the pandemic. A quarantine with the Maisels would go either way, you could either laugh your guts out just by watching them talk over each other or you could find yourselves like Midge's children, completely voiceless, like those invisible supporting actors.

Either way, it's the same way I feel about Season 4. After having watched the first two episodes of the show that were provided for review, I can say that the show can go ahead in two ways, either it continues to follow its previous format of making it all about Midge's reactive nature or it could finally try to bring us a newer side of her. From the first two episodes though, it surely seems like the show is back with an underwhelming start. If there's one thing that the past two years of taught us, it's that change is inevitable and for how long could we see Midge's storyline being put in the same template?