[This story contains spoilers to the fourth season of Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.]
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel fans received bittersweet news a day before the fourth season premiered when it was announced that the Amazon series would be returning for a fifth — and final — run.
“We always had a general endpoint in mind for the series, but it was somewhere at four or five or six or something like that,” co-showrunner Dan Palladino tells The Hollywood Reporter. “And it just seemed to fit in season five.”
Though saying goodbye to Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), Joel Maisel (Michael Zegen), Abe and Rose Weissman (Tony Shaloub and Marin Hinkle) and the rest of the main characters made sense for the storyline, that doesn’t mean it’s been easy for the team behind the Emmy-winning hit comedy.
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Over the last four years, the cast and crew has grown very close, co-showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino explains, adding that it’s the end for a tightly knit family. “We’re all going through giant separation anxiety right now,” she tells THR. “We’re all clinging to each other.”
Brosnahan recently echoed that sentiment when talking to THR about soaking up every moment of the last season, which is already in production, even if it means being a few minutes late getting a shot. “We’re just trying to have fun and treasure this thing that has changed all of our lives so much,” she said in an interview about the season four finale and what’s to come.
Now, the creator husband-and-wife duo reflect on their emotions as Maisel comes to its endgame, share how they hoped season four would resonate — and what it was like reuniting with several Gilmore Girls in the 1960s-set comedy — while also noting their “meticulous” approach to the final season: “The point of anything is to stick the landing.” Read the chat, below.
Did you always have a five-season gameplan for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel?
Dan Palladino: No. When you start out, you have an “I hope we get a second year” game plan. You never know. You sort of build a series. We’re always looking ahead when we come up with stories and, when we break a season, we’re always looking to where we could go. We always had a general endpoint in mind for the series, but it was somewhere at four or five or six or something like that. And it just seemed to fit in season five.
How does ending the series now up the stakes for what’s to come in season five?
Amy Sherman-Palladino: The point of anything is to stick the landing, no matter what, so I don’t know that it ups the game any more than it would have upped the game if we could have gone six or seven seasons. When it came down to five and out, we sat down and said, “OK, now what do we do to make sure that we stick the landing?” Because, that’s the most important thing.
We’ve invested so much time and energy and resources in these people and their journeys, the bar is just making sure that we put this cast through what we put them through and made them work as hard as they did, and that they get to come out of this feeling like they’ve made a good journey, and that their characters have traveled and ended someplace of worth. So, that’s not at all pressure! (Laughs.) We are just slogging through and being very meticulous. We’re really paying attention to our story-breaking process to make sure that everybody is given their moment and given their due time and space. So, we’re going to be in sort of a hyper-panic fog until September.
How did everyone take the news?
Palladino: Well, we’re a very close tribe here.
Sherman-Palladino: We’re all going through giant separation anxiety right now. So, it’s not the best time to ask that. (Laughs.)
Palladino: In some ways, you want it to go 10 or 12 years. Like, if the devil said, “You have to commit the rest of your careers to this group,” it’d be like, “Sure.” I probably would. It’s a fantastic ensemble and one that’s going to be hard to repeat in the future. We’re all very close, very respectful of each other. We just grew very, very close. There’s all different age ranges in our cast, and so there’s brother figures and father figures and son figures, and there’s all those kinds of things. So, that’s always tough. I don’t think anyone’s walking away, going, “Ugh. Thank God.”
Sherman-Palladino: We’re all clinging to each other right now.
Palladino: It’s a special, unique experience. We did it once with Gilmore Girls. It’s hard to do it again. We luckily did it again, and we would like to do it again. But, it’s hard and we’ll never have a cast like this again.
Sherman-Palladino: Or a crew. That’s the thing: It’s the loss of a tightly-knit family, and you feel that loss.
Now, looking back, Midge kind of goes through the wringer this season. What was the thought process behind that?
Sherman-Palladino: Midge had been someone who was so supremely confident — life was not a scary thing to her and change was not a frightening thing to her. It was more of an exciting thing that I think she looked back and sort of looked at herself as being swept along by events and suddenly decided, “I don’t want to be swept along. I want to take control” — which, by the way, we all do, like “Goddammit, I want to do it my way now, fuckers.” And I think she just hit that point with Shy, and she made a terrible mistake. But she wasn’t allowed to even pay penance for it; she was shoved out and she’s like, “I need to take control of my own destiny. If not now, when?”
Now, that comes with a lot of good things. It comes with a lot of strength and confidence and determination. But when you’re navigating waters that you don’t really know how to navigate, sometimes you can find yourself in a very frustrating position in trying to stick to your own goals and your own mandate. It’s an internal struggle and a debate that I go through hourly. I just had a fit before we got on the phone — I think there’s another one coming in about 20 minutes! (Laughs.) It’s just that frustration of wanting to control your destiny and not being quite sure how to wrangle that control from the outside forces.
What were your hopes going into season four — and, do you think you accomplished them now that the season has been released?
Sherman-Palladino: This was our COVID season. So, it was the weird, unvaccinated times of masks and eating at sad, lonely, single tables and deep angst because our ladies, Rachel especially, could not put on masks because of the wigs. So, it was a lot of us just nervous and really not wanting that to happen. Our biggest hope for the season was that, at the end of the season, people didn’t look at it like, “Well, it was COVID.” So that’s why the shoots felt smaller or more internal, or less vivid or less energetic or less fun.
Palladino: It was like, “Fuck you, COVID. Let’s start on Coney Island.”
Sherman-Palladino: It was sort of the “Fuck you, COVID” season. We steer clear of reading almost anything about the show ourselves out of simple self-preservation and wishing to get out of bed in the morning; I can’t say that I’ve trolled the papers to see. But I’m hoping they felt that. I hope they didn’t feel deprived of the things that Maisel promises them. We certainly tried as hard as we could to keep the story of the New York world going. One thing that we really liked a lot, and hopefully that translated, was because we couldn’t travel that much outside of our borders as we’ve done before, it really forced us to focus back in on our home, New York, so our characters were together more. Even though they were all on different journeys, they were living together more, working together more. And, we liked that. We liked seeing our people back in each other’s orbits a little bit. The season before, everybody was out. Midge was on tour, and people were sort of separate. So that, we thought, was a nice change for this season as opposed to the season before it. Hopefully, it translated to people more than Dan and I sitting in this office.
Talk us through the thought process behind Abe and Rose’s major character arcs in season four: Abe working as a critic, Rose going to battle with the Matchmaker Mafia.
Palladino: Well, you know, we always go back to the big bang when Joel dumped Midge in the pilot, and she ends up onstage. It was like the big bang that threw all the characters off their normal orbits. So, everyone now — including Abe and Rose, especially — are doing things they would not have done if things had not changed drastically. Rose would be a stifled woman of the house.
Sherman-Palladino: Probably there’d be a third grandchild for a Rose, too.
Palladino: Abe would still be a not-happy professor with unhappy students. So, we’re trying to show that her explosion in that pilot sort of sent everybody in their own direction. We’re just showing Abe and Rose, who are two people of a certain age, starting anew, starting over, trying to figure out their loves, their hobbies, their work and also trying to entertain.
Shy and Midge’s reunion after their falling out was both heartfelt and heartbreaking. Is there a chance they can make amends?
Sherman-Palladino: Midge realized that, in show business, there are show business friends and show business friends are not friends, and it’s easy to mistake that. It’s something you learn when you grow very close to people because you’re together for three months, and then all of a sudden you never talk to them again. All of a sudden, you realize some relationships are not forever, and I think that it’s all sort of Midge feeling a little naive, a little untethered.
I will say, I think she has been carrying what she did at the Apollo with her ever since that moment. Midge is someone who can be a little blind to what’s going on around her, but she would have jumped in front of a bus for Shy. She would have deflected anything for Shy, and the fact that she hurt him in a moment of panic for herself was killing her the entire time. So that apology was going to happen at some point. The fact that she saw him at this wedding, this manufactured [wedding], cut off from his family, from Reggie, from the band — who may have bitched and moaned about him, but they were a bonded family — and seeing him very lonely, that’s hard for her.
I will say that LeRoy [McClain] and Rachel, the performances they gave in that scene are as stellar as I’ve ever seen from both of them. LeRoy was such a treasure to have around and we miss him. We were so excited even to get him back for one day. He’s such a layered person and to give them this opportunity, two people who want connection, but they’re just not in a moment to be connected at all — those are the saddest moments. Shy looking at a new life without any support system around him and then looking at someone like Midge, who maybe could have been a friend. Although, I think Shy is in a different realm now where friendship means something very different. All his friends have become employees. It’s the Elvis Presley syndrome: Your friends are your hangers-on. They’re your friends but you’re paying them. So, how friendly could they be? That’s where he’s at in that scene. I think there’s always a possibility to have him back. There’s always possibility for reconciliation or at least reconnection, now that the playing field has been leveled with her apology.
How was it reuniting with Gilmore Girls castmembers Milo Ventimiglia, Kelly Bishop, Chris Eigeman and Scott Cohen this season?
Palladino: We love all those people. It was a total accident. We never said like, “Hey, let’s invite all these people.” We always have people in mind, but we insist on giving them the right roles and not just having them in, or else it feels like pointless stunt casting. So, especially for Kelly, when this role of this woman who’s sort of the head of this cabal of matchmakers came up, it was just a natural for her. It’s not a giant role, but it’s a key choice role, and we knew that she would do it the way she did it.
Sherman-Palladino: Kelly is a boss.
Palladino: For Milo, we needed that cameo role, but we needed somebody with weight. There were a lot of guys that were submitted to us but, for this kind of story, you needed someone to bring a lot of weight with them.
Sherman-Palladino: And charm and the face. The Milo effect. When Milo walks onstage, there’s a Milo effect.
Palladino: And then Chris is someone that we have stayed friends with. He seemed like a natural. He doesn’t act, he more so writes and directs these days. But that seemed natural, and he’ll be with us for a few more episodes. And Scott.
Sherman-Palladino: Scott Cohen’s Scott Cohen. How do you top Scott Cohen?
Palladino: It was fun. We worked with a lot of great actors on Gilmore Girls. We’re always looking for new people, but we always look to repeat with certain people that we love.
Do you see season five as the end of the franchise, or would you explore spinoff ideas, a movie or maybe a reboot down the line?
Sherman-Palladino: Wow. When we did the [Netflix] Gilmore Girls “reboot,” which was just four movies, it wasn’t really a reboot. I don’t know, had there been many reboots before then? I think there was Fuller House, but there weren’t a lot of reboots. And now, it’s such a thing. I don’t know, I mean, we always set out to tell a story, to take them on their journey. You want to leave while people still want you there. You don’t want to leave when people are saying, “You know what, why don’t you leave?” We want to make sure that when we go out, we go out with a bang. I think it’s too early to think about anything — I don’t know about a reboot, I don’t know why we would do that, but I don’t know. For the rest of our lives, we’ll want to be in the same room with this cast and this crew. But whether or not that’s at a bar or there’s a camera running, I have no idea.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
The fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is now streaming on Amazon Prime. Read THR‘s interview with Brosnahan on the season here.
