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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Tomorrow will say goodbye to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as the lauded comedy releases its final episode after a five-year award-laden run. When it comes to the New Yorkiest of New Yorkie shows, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a bit of a time capsule comedy.

Speaker 2: Hi, Grandpa.

Speaker 3: Your mother thinks we're schnorrers.

Speaker 2: Hi, Grandma.

Speaker 4: Your grandfather's being stubborn.

Speaker 2: Hi, Mommy.

Speaker 5: Go back to bed, Ethan.

Alison Stewart: The series starts in the late 1950s when Midge Maisel, a well-bred Upper West Side Jewish stay-at-home mother of two discovers her husband is having an affair with his receptionist. Midge heads downtown, gasps and tells her story on stage at a village comedy club.

Midge Maisel: My life's completely fell apart today. Did I mention that my husband left me?

Alison Stewart: There she discovers her own voice and decides to pursue a career as a profane and outspoken female comic. When The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel debuted in 2017, it helped put Amazon Prime on the map as a streaming service. It was created by the powerhouse team of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, the duo behind The Gilmore Girls and Bunheads. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was a roaring success raking in Emmys, Golden Globes, and even a Peabody Award. We had the pleasure of having Amy and Dan Palladino join us in the studio. In honor of the show's finale, here's an encore presentation of that interview from 2019. I began the conversation by asking Amy Sherman-Palladino to describe Mitch Maisel's character arc.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: I wanted her to be someone who's like, "This is it, I won. This is great." When it left her, she really felt like she had completely lost everything. Then she found her superpower, which is comedy and being able to get up on stage and talk about her life and talk about everyone else in her life, whether they wanted to or not. She also discovered a really strong ambitious streak in her that has taken over everything and her new guiding light. She wears really cute dresses. She wears such cute dresses.

Alison Stewart: Great.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Really tiny waist and she wears hats and it's adorable.

Alison Stewart: Rachel Brosnahan was pretty unknown to most people, not a household name when she took the role. What is it about her, you think, that she gets about this part?

Dan Palladino: It's unusual. A lot of people in our business, in the comedy business are like, if someone plays a standup comic, it should either be a standup comic or obviously someone who's done comedy, and Rachel had done, I think, almost pretty much no comedy.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: I think Rachel's entire career was her being kidnapped and thrown in ditches and a lot of crying.

Dan Palladino: To Amazon's credit, a lot of companies would ding an actress like this and just say, "We don't want to experiment with somebody trying to act funny," but to us, we were really intrigued. I think what she came in was, again, it's the confidence word. Midge is very confident. Rachel is very confident. That really helps. She was holding her sides and her hands were not shaking, and a lot of actresses' hands shake. It was a big part to audition for and we gave them three big scenes to do. I think the confidence, and I think she also got the underlying anger that is in every comedian and she's innately got that. She's just this incredible actress who pulled off the stunt of being a realistic standup comic, going through all the phases of learning it. It was a really tough thing to do. I think just the confidence is what really sold it.

Alison Stewart: To Midge's confidence, that confidence doesn't always make her a hundred percent likable.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: No. We weren't actually interested in that, because we had come from-- you spend years on network television where they're like, "Oh, she can't raise her voice. That's not likable," or, "Oh, make sure she doesn't wear red. Red is not likable," and like, "Oh, the hair. Make sure the hair's really likable." The last thing in the world I ever want to hear again in my entire life is, "Is the female character likable?" Is she interesting? Is she viable? Is her journey something that people want to watch? The great thing about, again, Rachel Brosnahan, who is just a steamroller through life, she wasn't interested in being likable.

She was interested in playing somebody very interesting and very different from what she had played before. We got lucky, because you don't want to have to spend half your time talking your actress into, "It doesn't matter if you're likable. It's okay if you raise your voice. It doesn't matter. You're a human being. Sometimes human beings aren't likable. 90% of them are never likable. At least you're going to be likable 50%, 60% of the time. That's not bad by human standards."

Dan Palladino: Men had been pulling it off in TV for many, many years. Al from Deadwood, everyone loved him. Tony Soprano, everyone loved him. Walter White, everyone loved him. If you hated those guys personally, you would not watch the show even though they were often despicable. There's been an obvious double standard for women characters in movies and TV. We wanted to make sure that you saw the foibles of this character too, that you saw that she was human and sometimes very, very selfish and sometimes very, very self-centered and maybe not the best mother all the time. Mothering standards were so different back then. We wanted to reflect that you didn't hover over your child and you didn't necessarily tell your child you loved them every day and every hour. We're trying to do what men have gotten away with for a long time.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: The ambition in women is something that, I think, a lot of times people think is an unattractive trait. Yet, in men ambition is how you get what you want in life. The more that Midge performs, and the more that she hones her skills, the more she realizes how ambitious she is, that she doesn't just want to get up at the Gaslight and have her Wednesday night set. She wants to be famous. She wants to take this as far as she can take it. Her learning that is both a little unnerving to herself, to everyone around her, and yet that is the driving force now.

It is like that fierce ambition is going to be pulling against her natural need to, "Do I want family and comfort and go to the butcher shop and look cute every day and hang out with my mom in the same apartment that I grew up in, or do I want to take over the world, which could be a lonelier, scarier, maybe less emotionally fulfilling and yet more fulfilling in some ways?" That's going to be her pull for the rest of the series.

Alison Stewart: You said something so interesting in your answer about actresses being concerned about their perception of not being likable, even though they're playing a part. Is that really an issue for young actresses that you've run into?

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Oh, absolutely.

Dan Palladino: Oh, yes.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Absolutely. What's interesting that I found because I tend to write characters who at some point are going to yell. At some point, usually in the pilot, they're going to yell at somebody. I have found that it's a hard thing for a lot of actresses to do because they are so aware of the fact that behind the scenes, a lot of times they're judged on how feminine you are and how likable you are, and raising your voice and yelling is not considered a likable trait in a woman. A lot of times you have to really tell actresses like, "You've got to yell."

Dan Palladino: Yes, it's okay.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: "You're pissed. You've got to yell. Your husband left you. If there's any time when you can yell, perhaps this is a time." It is a thing, and hopefully the more that parts are being written for actresses that aren't being decided on the level of likability, but more on the level, "What is the journey? How interesting is this person? Do they have a story to tell?", maybe actresses in the future will not be coming to the table with that baggage on them, but it is an issue. Not for Rachel.

Alison Stewart: Rachel's good.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Rachel doesn't care. Rachel's like, "Ah, I'll just go out there. You want me to kill a kitten? I'll do it. That's fine. I'm good."

Alison Stewart: My guests are Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino. One of the things interesting about this show, there are many interesting things, but I like the anthropological excavation of New York City and this particular family at this time. There are a lot of details about this affluent Jewish family on the Upper Side, down to where the dad works and how they keep the house. What was it about this time period that you thought was really ripe, and if you could share a couple of details that you put in the script and in the family composition to let us know more about this family at this time?

Amy Sherman-Palladino: The time period was really picked because comedy was starting to shift a little bit and starting to become a little bit more talking about real things and life and politics and family and sexuality. It hadn't been before. Comedy had been a little bit more like, "Take my wife, please." We felt like that time period would be an interesting time to throw someone who's just starting a career in comedy, because it's straddling that old school, new school world, and especially a woman, where there just weren't a lot of women in comedy. It's tough for a woman in comedy now, but back then it was a nightmare. To put somebody who is finding her voice, so actually talking about things is going to be important to her and not pretending to be a character or a quaint or ugly, not putting a weird boa on her, and talk about the voice. That she's actually going to go and talk about being young, being possibly divorced, possibly what does she do now? Children, should she have been a mother? She never thought about it before, that these are things that she wants to be able to talk about on stage. That time period felt right for that.

Dan Palladino: Yes. As far as the family and the whole setting, we always kept in mind that this is a generation and a time when World War II, almost all the young men walking around were World War II veterans. When Zach Levi came on last year and played the Dr. Benjamin, I don't know if we mentioned it, but we told him, he is a World War II veteran. We always kept that in mind. Of course, for a Jewish family, we always keep in mind that the Holocaust was 15 years before, and that also not only was it the heartbreak of that era and of what happened, but also this is a Jewish family now that is prosperous, feeling safe, feeling affluent, and is really becoming a natural part of the American fabric.

That's something that we always keep in mind, too. Of course, Midge blows it up with-- because of what happened to her, she decides to take a path that this family was not expecting, that this family did not want. Everything's shaken up, but it is a family that was just becoming like the true American family back then.

Alison Stewart: There's a lot of references to Lenny Bruce, is that real people? There's a Jane Jacobs rally. [laughs]

Dan Palladino: She's on camera.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Sure. Why not?

Alison Stewart: Why not?

Amy Sherman-Palladino: I mean, Jane Jacobs has not gotten her due.

Dan Palladino: Because the younger demographic was dying on screen-

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Clamoring.

Dan Palladino: -depiction of Jane Jacobs.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: If I could tell you how many letters we got.

Alison Stewart: Hashtag Jane Jacobs.

Dan Palladino: 14-year olds, 15-year olds, they're such Jane Jacobs fanatics. It's crazy.

Alison Stewart: When you sit down and you work together and you decide to write and incorporate something like that, how does that come up? Is it just, "Hey, Dan, I've got an idea, let's put in Jane Jacobs," or is it more planned?

Dan Palladino: We discovered at the time that Jane Jacobs did have this really big rally because they were going to build a road through Washington Square Park. A lot of people don't remember that, but it was going to go, I think through-

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Through the arch.

Dan Palladino: -the arch and the traffic was going to go right through it. This was the Robert Moses era, and this was the stuff that people had not been fighting, and the fight was starting and Jane Jacobs was starting to lead that fight and she did lead that fight. We created that in season one, end even the signage they had was the exact signage that they had, the exact words on the signs that they had back then. Jane Jacobs came out of like, we knew it was happening and we knew it would be a funny thing for Midge to stumble upon. Sometimes it's just a matter of-- it wasn't really this burning desire to have Jane Jacobs on, but it just was the right format for Midge to have some comedy and in fact go up and do an impromptu comedy routine, which he did in that episode.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Everything's got to come out of a story. We didn't want to set out to do just a show of people showing up and doing impressions. That's not really what the show is because we're building our own reality here. At certain times there are certain touchstones. Lenny Bruce came about because he is the example of the new comedy and the new way of thinking. It felt like he would be a good muse for her and somebody to emulate up to a certain point, where it went wrong for him, which we haven't hit yet, but at this point when he was really somebody talking about things, it felt like that's a good touchstone for her.

We threw him in the pilot as that representation. Then, of course, we fell in love with Luke Kirby and he's such a great actor and it just felt like it popped up a lot more times to bring him back. Just as much, we make up the Jane Lynch character who plays Sophie Lennon, she's not a real character. We took bits and pieces of other, ideas of other female comics and--

Alison Stewart: Sophie Tucker, the reclamation of that name-

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Yes, a little bit. Phyllis Diller would go home and paint, and she'd be very--

Dan Palladino: Lived in Bel Air by the hills.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Yes. Lived in Bel Air. Joan Rivers had these beautiful antiques that she cared about, and really wanted to be a series actress. We took bits and pieces of these other comedians and put them together in Jane Lynch. Basically, it's all about us. When it suits us, we'll do it, and when it doesn't suit us, screw it.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino. I heard you say it earlier, when I was watching a roundtable interview that you were on of writers, just your joy of not being at a network.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Oh, my God.

Alison Stewart: Let's put it in the positive, shall we?

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Hallelujah.

Alison Stewart: For civilians, let's say you were doing this show for a major network. Think about a scene or something that you wanted to do, and how that would've gone at the network?

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Well, this show could not have been done at the network.

Alison Stewart: Period.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: No. In a gazillion years, they all would've said, "Oh my God, we want to do that show," and that would've been the end of it. They may have even gone so far as to pick up a pilot and then you try to cast it and that would've been the end of it.

Dan Palladino: Then they would damn you. When they call you to tell you that your project's not going forward, the first thing they say to people like us is, "I love the writing, I love-- the writing is so amazing." Amy and I look at each other like-

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Oh, we're done.

Dan Palladino: -we're are sunk. That's it.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: We'd just be canceled. It's all over.

Dan Palladino: We're still schmucks with Underwoods. There's a lot of reasons why this character wouldn't-- because you see this character and you think, "Oh, she's so sweet, she's so likable and her journey is interesting to me." They would not like a lot of aspects of it. They would not like her ambition. I'm saying traditionally, I don't know who's at the networks now, because we haven't worked on a network in ages.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: We never will again.

Dan Palladino: We came up in a system where basically we're not going to tell you exactly how old we are.

Alison Stewart: 130,000.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: We're the same vintage.

Dan Palladino: It's something like that. We came up at a time where basically there were four networks and it was an extremely conservative business. We're not just talking about-- now we can say curse words on TV, which has positives, but you don't have to. All in the Family was a great show. It was on a network. They never said a curse word. They said certain words that we don't say anymore. There have been great, great great network comedies, great network shows, but generally-

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Not in a long time, though.

Dan Palladino: Not in a long, long time.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: Think about the networks, what people need to understand is networks are run by the marketing department. That is the basic difference. When the marketing department, the people who have to sell soap are making creative decisions and that is the bottom line, then you're screwed, because they only care about the demographics that's going to buy the Tide or buy the car or buy this, and your piece has to conform to that. There is no interest in conforming what they do to your piece. Also, they have changed the structure of television so much. Back in the old days, when Dan and I and the dinosaurs roamed the Earth and we first started out in sitcom, sitcom was two acts. It's what? Five, six, acts now? They keep chopping it up and they make they make-

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: -the actual playing time shorter to put more commercial time in. Your ability to tell any cohesive story goes right out the window because every time you've got an act break that you've got to go to a commercial, you want to try and keep them and bring them back. You can't just take a a story and then chop it up. There's got to be a dun-dun-dun moment-

Alison Stewart: Bam-bam-bam commercial.

Amy Sherman-Palladino: -and then half the time when you come back from the commercial, you have to take back the dun-dun-dun moment because it was a lie because you had to put it in and then you had to sell the soap and then you've got to continue on. It's exhausting and it's just not a creative way of thinking about storytelling or character or the process. It's not gratifying to have nobody in the sphere of power be interested in the actual creative aspect of it, because that's really not what network television is set up to do. They are set up to sell ad time. When you go to a streaming service, they don't care. Kellogg's is like anyone else. Kellogg's can figure out how to turn on and fast forward. They're just watchers. They have no skin in the game.

Alison Stewart: Well, I think they would care more about the quality of the content because they have to entice people to come, too [crosstalk]. Like the public radio model, the public media model. It's the quality, or even the HBO. It's the quality of the content that makes people to have to take a jump.

Dan Palladino: Like Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is not going to have as many viewers as Hawaii Five-0 at its peak on the network. I have a feeling they don't share any data with us and we don't need to know the data. I have a feeling that like a show like Marvelous Mrs. Maisel probably draws us enough people of alike interest that suit them in some way. They let us do our thing and it's really nice to be able to do our thing. Then it's up to us to entertain the audience. If people like Amazon let us do our thing, then the responsibility is on us to do our thing well, because the audience is always right.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, the executive producers of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Its final episode starts streaming on Amazon Prime tomorrow. That's Friday. There's more All Of It on the way, including your remembrances of Tina Turner. Text them to us. The text number is 212-433-9692, 212-433 WNYC. Help us remember Tina Turner. That's happening right after the news.

 

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