The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Finale: Reckoning with ambition, fame, and the appeal of a guardian angel

The relationship between Midge Maisel and Lenny Bruce takes center stage in the show's finale and with good reason.

A big, big life born from pain

As the season 5 trailer teases, Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) wants a big life. She wants to break all the rules and if the series finale illustrates anything, it’s that the road to success and finding fame (not always the same) is paved with a whole lot of work and measured chutzpah.

When Midge came onto the scene in Season 1, she was playing the role of supportive wife to her husband Joel (Michael Zegen), who, bored with his day job and trying to be a standup comic, announces right before Yom Kippur he is leaving her and her two small children for their secretary.

What did Midge do in response to this news? She found a mic, got up in front of a ton of strangers at the now closed Gaslight club in Greenwich Village, and she vented - rather poetically, humorously, and with respectable vulgarity - about the absurdity of her situation. She was effervescent and much to the chagrin of Joel, she was the much more inspired comic.

I surface this first episode because it set the stage for the finale in masterful ways that you can only appreciate by re-watching the 1st episode again after watching the finale, which I did at very late hours last night. I also watched Season 4, episode 8 (Season 4 finale) episode - the penultimate season - because all three tie together and the common intersecting point is Lenny Bruce, Midge’s mentor, ally, and for a brief, flickering moment in the Season 4 finale, her bed companion, but only after running in a snowstorm from a club raid with Lenny and being led to the closest shelter - apparently Lenny’s hotel room, which they painted blue for him.

A tribute to Lenny

Source: Prime Video / Lenny Bruce takes the stage and “gets”

In real life, we know the tragic tale of Lenny Bruce and his descent into legal troubles based on his lewd stage acts and the drugs which ultimately killed him. To say he had demons would be an understatement, but Team Sherman-Palladino, the show’s creators, always proclaimed the Maisel version of Lenny (Luke Kirby) was his own separate being, wholly part of the dramatic universe of this fictional show. He was also intended to be a bit part in one episode but after seeing the chemistry between Kirby and Brosnahan, the show runners decided to keep him around and as luck would have it, for us, the show’s viewers, this turned out to be a very good thing.

In the show’s first episode, in the act that launches her standup career, Midge exposes her breasts to the audience and uses profanity so she ends up being carted off to prison. It’s there, in the cop car, where she meets Bruce and the two of them bond, fellow rule breakers and talented comics. Ironically, at this point in her life (1958), Midge is the opposite of a rule breaker. She’s the affluent, educated Jewish wife, mother, and daughter from the Upper West Side who has never taken a swerve off the straight and narrow, but that’s about to change and largely due to her meeting Bruce and Susie.

Midge is in awe of Lenny Bruce, knowing what a big deal he is, but also for his tell-it-like-it-is and don’t-take-no-shit-from-anyone manner. When Midge returns the next morning to bail Bruce out of jail, he isn’t super encouraging but he recognizes a fellow diehard standup comic- relaying to Midge that comedy is a tough business but given a choice between comedy or any other job he'd choose comedy.

Fast forward from hero worship to the reality of the business

A few years later post-Carnegie Hall show, Lenny disillusions Midge of her hero worship in that pinnacle season 4 finale, after she turns down being the opener for Tony Bennett that Lenny pulls strings for her to be apart of. It could be the beginning of her big break, Lenny is trying to convey, but Midge wants to do things on her terms, even if it means turning down big opportunities, which she’s been doing a lot of. She won’t be an opening act. The dialogue in this scene is electric and sets Midge up for the swift kick in the rear from Lenny she needs to catapult her into Season 5 and her break on The Gordon Ford Show. I highly urge you to watch the last 10 minutes of this season 4 episode. Kirby and Brosnahan are luminous.

Lenny: I’m at Carnegie Hall. I’ve got 5 minutes where maybe I can help you before I’m thrown out again. One thing you are not is dumb.

Midge: Wait a minute. You never compromise. You get up onstage knowing the police could be there, or hell, that they are, and you say whatever the hell you want anyhow. Why is it wrong for me to want to do the same?

Lenny: Jesus Christ, Midge. What a f*cking pedestal you put me on. Getting arrested is not a badge of honor. Getting arrested means I can’t work where I want to work. It’s exactly the opposite of what I want for myself.

Midge: I’m not hiding.

Lenny: You sure as f*ck are hiding.

Midge: I’m not hiding. I have a plan.

Lenny: Don’t plan. Work!

I’ve skipped some lines in between some of the dialogue presented above, but the key points are for Midge to get clear about what she wants and how to get there, even if this means getting hired and fired over and over again. That’s part of the process of getting to the endgame.

Just work

As Midge leaves Carnegie Hall and this prophetic, heated conversation with Lenny, she reads a sign for “The Gordon Ford Show” which Midge reads it as “Go Forward” in the haze of the blizzard. Midge has always had two guardians in this show - One being Lenny, who gets plenty of screen time in the finale, and rightfully so. It was Lenny that saw Midge for more than a pretty girl with a sassy mouth. He saw her light, her talent and her drive. When they consummate their relationship in season 4 finally, and she pleas with him ahead of time for this act to not diminish him seeing her as funny, as a comic, he has to swear to her that it won’t and to his credit, as witnessed by that interaction at Carnegie Hall, he doesn’t.

It is always about the work. In the latter years of your life, your happiness and your self-esteem will be determined by the mountains you surmounted, the valleys you climbed out of, and the life and/or career that you forged for yourself.

- Maya Angelou, Rainbow in the Cloud

As Season 5 opens and Midge takes a job as a the sole female writer on ”The Gordon Ford Show,” she must swallow a lot of her pride and abandon her ideals on equity and working past the institutionalized chauvinism on the show, and use her wits and talents to forge a path to get air time on camera - a hard “no“ rule for writers on the show, mostly because Gordon Ford (Reid Scott), doesn’t want to deal with the competition from his staff.

While still being a show writer by day, Midge performs stand up at night and tries out for the Jack Parr show and doesn’t get the gig. It’s at this point, deflated from the Parr loss, where she feels stuck and she goes to Susie and tells her she’s gotta do something more drastic, high stakes for Midge or else. Enough of playing it safe with her career. We get to witness some of Susie’s backstory, being gay and formerly in a college relationship with the only love of her life, Hedy (Nina Arianda), now Ford’s wife. Susie calls in a favor to Hedy who then goes to Gordon and tells him in no uncertain terms, that he needs to get Midge on the show.

Rules are meant to be broken

Rules Are Mostly Made To Be Broken and Are Too Often For The Lazy To Hide Behind.

- General MacArthur

Often, getting to where you need to go requires breaking some rules. Often times, those rules were created by people, hell bent on staying in power, at all costs, even to the detriment of everyone and everything around them. Midge is not immune to this phenomenon. Her mantra from episode 1 has been to break the rules that don’t serve her and it’s what prompted her to go up on stage for the first time. She leans into this in the finale as she breaks form on Gordon’s show. Gordon, pissed that he was “womanhandled” or bamboozled by a few broads, decides to marginalize Midge’s performance on the show and won’t even allow her to sit on the guest couch, he’s doing most of the talking and casting her in a very performative role. At every point, he tries to diminish her speaking time on screen and undermine her, even cutting to commercial 4 minutes early, but it’s Midge who gets the best of him, by taking the 4 minutes she has left to wow the audience and break from Gordon’s script.

What transpires onscreen as she finds her rhythm, and her family and friends in the audience, is to put out the finest form of her comedy that we’ve seen from her in the 5 years of this show. She’s honest, brutally funny, but not unkind, and plays to her experience as a privileged, educated Jewish woman from the upper west side of NYC, who yes, was cheated on by her ex husband, and yes is working woman in the 60s with active, unapologetic ambition (generally valued in men and shunned in women) and a strong desire for autonomy, but not too much independence (she wants to be able to hire people to fix her stuff, not do it herself). Plus she often can’t remember the names of her kids, so yeah, maybe she’s failing at all that parent thing too. It’s raw and edgy but mostly PG-13 and everyone is there for it. She’s in her element.

Her gamble with the mic pays off, the audience applauds and is laughing with her the whole way through, and Gordon, his hubris on display, knows it would be a bad move to not invite Midge to the couch after her dazzling display and all that will come with it in the future. It’s here that Gordon, invites Midge to the couch, and as an homage to the show’s title, proclaims Midge as, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” before firing her as a writer on his show. As an aside, I couldn’t tell if this was coming from a vindictive place, or a more positive place - a “kick in the pants, now go off and be famous” place, but assuming with Ford’s personality, it’s resting somewhere in between, and maybe closer to the vindictive one.

Chinese Fortune Cookies

There’s a beautiful Lenny and Midge scene in the finale, a flashback to 1961, six months before Midge’s big break on Gordon’s show, where he takes her for Chinese post-coitus. In what might be labeled as pillow talk, but really pillow talk is beneath the relationship of these two (let’s be honest), Lenny is telling Midge that she will be big and that she will get break soon. In what is probably the most memorable takeaway from the scene, he pretends to read her fortune from the cookie, and of course he replaces his works for the “Your lucky numbers are X, X, X” that’s really on the paper:

A spotlight waits for you center stage. All you have to do is step up and claim it. Once you do, everyone will know who you are. They will know your wit, your intellect, your smile. Your great expressive eyes. They will be helpless to your charms. They will fall at your feet and worship at the alter of your show corset.

Bruce goes on to say, “Very soon, in the not so distant future, you will be paying for the Chinese food.” As we know from Bruce’s move to California at the beginning of the show’s season and at the end of the series, as Midge tries to rescue Lenny from himself, this was sadly one of their last meaningful interactions, save the Carnegie Hall scene.

As luck, but really hard work, chutzpah, and a good support system, would have it, Midge’s career success is a known factor since the beginning of this season through a series of flash forwards. She goes on to never stop working and amasses a lot of wealth in the process, but it’s really the work that keeps her going. This is something we see in Midge complaining to her managers in 2005, about not working on one of the days in the week, even though she’s booked for the rest of the days. When the manager hints at her taking a day to rest, Midge appears visibly annoyed. Midge has learned the lesson that Lenny was teaching her all along. That the endgame means you keep on working and never stop. Unfortunately, this isn’t something Lenny gets to experience himself with any longevity, having died in 1966, not long after Midge tries to rescue him in season 5.

In the last few minutes of the show, the audience, myself included, gets what we needed to end the show - clearly Midge and Susie have reconciled, perhaps in the 90s after Susie gets that honor for her career (S5 E6 - The Testi-Roastial), and we see in a flash forward from 2005, Midge and Susie on the phone together watching via a VHS tape an episode of “Jeopardy” and trying to guess the show’s winners and the show’s answers which are really questions. Their natural banter and laughter takes over and they stop watching at some point, more engrossed in what animal they come back as, once they die. It feels like a fitting end for a show which was all about friendship and purpose and taking big swings.

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For more of my Maisel musings, check out my convo with CC, the AI.