Gilmore Girls creator’s warm and vibrant new series

GILMORE Girls fans, we have good news. No, not another revival. This is even better.

SUCH is the cultural cachet of Gilmore Girls that from now until the end of time, anything writer and producer Amy Sherman-Palladino does will be compared to her most famous creation.

With that caveat out of the way, if you are a fan of the fast-talking, confident and clever Lorelai, you’re going to love the fast-talking, confident and clever Midge.

Despite its 1958 New York City setting, Sherman-Palladino’s new series shares a lot of DNA with the Gilmores. Both protagonists have grown up in a world of upper-middle-class privilege and they’re both “modern women” trying to forge an unconventional path.

In Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, we first meet Miriam “Midge” Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan, House of Cards) in a pre-credits scene on her wedding day giving a speech.

She commands the microphone as she commands everything else in life, with flair, tenacity and irreverence — a shrimp joke leads to a “scriptural schism”, one that takes the Rabbi years to forgive.

The sequence is designed to give us an insight into Midge. She’s the kind of woman who thinks she has everything figured out, and has known exactly what she wanted for a long time. She can handle any challenge and knows how to manage all the quirky people in her life. But, like Lorelai, she’s also complex and flawed.

Marvelous Mrs Maisel marks the return of Alex Borstein (Drella and the original Sookie) to the Sherman-Palladino universe.

The show time jumps after the first few minutes to four years and two kids later. She’s a busy Jewish housewife supporting her hapless husband Joel’s (Michael Zegen) ludicrous stand-up comedy dreams. Spoiler alert: he’s not funny. By the end of the first episode, Midge’s world has been up-ended.

Set primarily in Manhattan and around the colourful beatnik-era Greenwich Village, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel focuses on Midge’s unlikely ambition to make a go of it as a stand-up. She’s sharp, has great instincts and is a hard, diligent worker. Of course, the gender politics of the day don’t make it an easy task.

Sherman-Palladino’s father was a stand-up and she grew up hearing stories from that time, of the heady days in Greenwich and the Catskills in upstate New York, and there’s a great affection in how the series paints that world.

Sherman-Palladino said the Jewishness of the show was inspired by the comedy of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner and wanting Midge’s comedy to have that cadence and the grounding of her family. That works really well with the rhythm of Sherman-Palladino’s dialogue, that fast-tempo and dexterous way with language.

Hearing it again is a delight to the aural senses and Brosnahan delivers it with aplomb.

As with her previous work, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a suspend-your-disbelief kind of deal. The flip side to its vibrancy and warmth is it doesn’t resemble reality. But, at this point, that’s not what you expect from a Sherman-Palladino production. The trade-off is worth it.

Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season one will drop on Amazon Prime Video on Wednesday, November 29.

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