‘Woman. Maisel Showrunners: Visit the Future in Season 5

It’s the final bow to Prime Video’s award-winning darling, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and the latest season introduces a new narrative device that changes the entire show.

The opening episode of “Maisel” Season 5 begins not with Midge (Rachel Brosnahan), her family or her manager Susie (Alex Borstein), but with her daughter — 23-year-old Esther Maisel (Alexandra Socha) — decades in the future. .

Creator and showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino told IndieWire that the “Maisel” creative team had been toying with time jumps for years, but felt it was too early to delve into the characters’ futures.

“They didn’t earn enough. No one has dealt with it yet,” he said. “But it was a tool that we really wanted to use… we went all-in on it because it’s a fun storytelling tool and it helps pop up faster. It makes the story a little bit more interesting now that we’re doing it, so that we know, “Oh, and this will be revealed later.” So we thought, let’s do it now – we’ve got another chance! Let’s do it.”

Connected

Connected

Philippe Antonello / Prime Video

Each of the three episodes in the Season 5 premiere opens with a flashback summarizing the characters’ futures. Esther’s therapy session suggests that Midge wasn’t immune to narcissism and neglect as a mother while rising to fame (duh), and Episode 2 opens with a “60 Minutes” segment interviewing young Mike Wallace (Currie Graham) makes with Midge and is a “living legend.”

It confirms what fans of the show have wondered for years: Midge Maisel made it. He’s rich, famous, friends with celebrities—even a Lenny Bruce-like bout on stage at Carnegie Hall in the 1970s was cursed, which ultimately benefited his career—and despite a string of high-profile partners, he doesn’t seem to have a relationship. .

“He admits that he hasn’t had a great, consistent love life,” executive producer Dan Palladino told IndieWire. “She thought she was going to get married one day,” she was referring to Joel (Michael Zegen), “and she’s been floundering ever since. A lot of that is just her lineage—we always felt like Joel was the guy who won her heart, and she could never give her heart to a guy like that again. So he had a good time, he was with Robert Evans, maybe he was with Quincy Jones at one point and so on and so forth, but he never had anything as fundamental as Joel.

Then there’s episode 3, where Ethan (Ben Rosenfeld) works as a farmer in Israel. The most important element of these early flash foreshadowings is that Midge’s ambitions and activities have affected her children, and this leads viewers to pay more attention to Ethan, Esther, and how everyone in the main timeline treats or acts around them. The first episode alone features a Thanksgiving dinner where Joel’s parents announce their divorce and Joel tells everyone he’s getting married and having a baby (both of which change within the episode). Ethan and Esther have been characters in the show since the beginning, but they mostly function in relation to the adults or as comic relief. The flashback is a stark reminder that these are people, that they’re just being introduced to their adulthood issues in that Upper West Side apartment.

It also draws attention to how Midge will fare with Susie—whom her relationship with in the future is so strained that Susie freely trashes Midge to the press—with Joel, and everyone else she’s close to, as Sherman-Palladino expands the context. What rifts could develop between Midge and Susie that will tear them apart for years? Where is Joel now that his kids are grown — or Rose (Marin Hinkle) or Abe (Tony Shalhoub)? As “Maisel” progresses, the story changes from both ends, the present and the future forming together as the audience prepares to say goodbye.

The first three episodes of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” Season 5 are now streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes every Friday.

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