"Mmmm, I don't know, I'm kind of thinking about a thing where a 1950s housewife gets sucked into the Greenwich Village comedy scene." That's how Amy Sherman-Palladino—one of TV's few genuinely singular voices—describes the pitch meeting with Amazon for her thrilling, vivacious new show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Their response? "They were like, great, do it!"
It's the second time in her career this has happened, Palladino says, the first being with Gilmore Girls back in 2000, the idea for which she says she thought up on the spot. "I open my big mouth and they say, 'Go write that,' and it's like no, that idea is actually all I have, you just heard it." But I sense she's being modest; if there's one thing Sherman-Palladino is not, it's short on ideas. Known and beloved for her inimitably fast-paced, quippy, pop culture–saturated dialogue, she also has a knack for creating enormously loveable characters and family dynamics that feel unusually lived-in.
Pivoting on a career-making turn from Rachel Brosnahan as the titular Midge, a buoyant, razor-sharp force of nature, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is one of Amazon's richest and most confident original shows to date. In the show's pilot, which has been available on Amazon since March, Midge's carefully constructed uptown dream life crumbles overnight, pushing her unwittingly towards the downtown comedy scene where her true calling may actually lie.
Having made her name writing deliberately small-scale, contemporary shows in tiny fictional towns, New York in the 1950s was a new frontier for Sherman-Palladino. While making the Netflix revival of Gilmore Girls, she was forced to spend a full year in Los Angeles ("A nightmare, a shitshow. Too much sun!") and a major part of her pitch this time around was her desire to stay on the east coast full time. You can't fake the quintessentially New York setting of Maisel, and so the show shoots on the streets and studio lots of Brooklyn. "I just wanted to be here. I want to take the subway to work, dammit, with my heels in my purse! I actually don't do that. But I could."
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel feels like the biggest show you've done, in terms of its production design and ambition. How did this combination of elements—the period setting, the New York Jewishness, the comedy scene—come together?
My dad was a comic, so I grew up with him and his comic friends sitting around [adopts a grizzled New Yawk accent] eatin' deli and talkin' about the Greenwich Village basket houses. And I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which is like growing up in a cardboard box. There's nothing there, it's just various shades of brown, so I had this fanciful idea of the Village as this place where everybody's smart, everybody's political, everybody's brilliant and funny, and music is always playing. I'm sure many people who actually lived through it would say, "That's not how it was at all—I had no hot water, there were rats, it was horrifying," but for me it was like Disneyland.
I knew I wanted to do a period piece, because I just don't want to type "Snapchat." I don't ever want to type it down in words. I'm not a social media girl anyhow, and I just want to go back to a simpler time, and use a rotary phone! And I wanted to do something with some scale. My dream for Gilmore Girls was always to give it more scale, and we just never got to do that, and quite frankly when you have Lauren Graham you don't need scale. She is scale. She's the mountain top. She's a genius.
Midge's relationship with her parents (played by Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle) is central to the show, but in a very different way than the mom-daughter relationships in Gilmore Girls. How would you compare and contrast those dynamics?
Lorelai and Emily had a very strange relationship, and were probably a little bit too similar in personality, but yet too different in worldview. They just could never, ever forge a truly close relationship. Whereas Midge, partially because she's in her twenties and still living a sort of fairytale life, she's very family-oriented. Her mother is everything to her; she wants to be her mother, and her mother's life is what she aspires to. The beautiful apartment, the husband, the maid who makes brisket…it's this whole weird fantasy about what her life should be. With Lorelai and her family, the journey was trying to edge them closer together, and Rory was the bridge. In Marvelous Mrs Maisel, the family dynamic is very tight and structured, until Midge decides to make this left turn that blows everything apart.
It's so satisfying, in the pilot, to watch Midge come to the realization that she's actually the one with the talent, not her mediocre husband. How did you strike that balance of making us root for Midge's independence, without making her marriage to Joel seem all bad?
They're two people who went into marriage young and with these blinders on, not really listening to each other. We're going to have the apartment, and the kids—Midge has this whole thing constructed, and once she ticked off the boxes she feels like, I got it! And that's when it all fell out from underneath her. They're both products of their time, but they're also both exceptional in various ways. Midge is this vivacious force of nature, but for a man in that period to choose the vivacious force of nature, and enjoy that, and want that in his life, says something about Joel too. He succumbs to pride, and ego, when he realizes that this marvelous creature he married is now going to look at him differently, after it emerges that he stole that joke.
I think if Midge really analyzes it, she would wonder, Why am I so upset that he stole this act, who gives a shit? This is something they were doing for fun. Who gives a crap how he got it? But it does bother her. It's not authentic. It's not brave. Midge, above all, admires bravery, and I think Joel knows that. He couldn't handle the fact that she didn't see him as brave any more, and that's why he left. But I also think the minute he got down to the curb, he put that suitcase down and was like, "What the fuck did I just do?" It's going to haunt him.
The last two months have been a pretty stunning game-changer for Hollywood. A flood of sexual misconduct stories have proved just how endemic that kind of behavior is in the industry. What do you think needs to happen in order for things to actually change?
I've been helped in my career more by men than women. Always. Men are the ones who have stood by me and given me the leg up. But I am not an actress, and it's a different, much more terrifying landscape when you're this pretty little thing put in the puppet masters' hands. I think it's great what's happening, but my fear about all of it is that until women are in a position to actually hand out the money, and greenlight projects, I just don't see how anything changes.
The guys that are going down, even Weinstein to a certain extent, are a little bit under the top rung. Just one step under. They've been anointed by the kings up top, but it's the kings up top that are still deciding who gets what, who moves forward, who doesn't move forward. And we need a queen up there. Until there's a woman up there, there's no checks and balances. Right now, even the women who are up at that top level have to go to a man to say yes or no. That's tricky. It's an awful lot of power for one group to have. No one group should ever be in charge of anything…unless it's women, and then we should just be in charge of everything.
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel season one is available to stream on Amazon from today.
