The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Seasons 1 and 2: Triumph for Risks and Laughter

I don't usually watch comedy on television or streaming, and review it even less.  But our daughter Molly raved about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel after the first season, and given that she'd recommended such winners as Alias and Sons of Anarchy, her praising of Maisel certainly put it on the possible list.  Sisters-in-laws and in-laws urged us to watch it, too.  But what put me over the top was the lunch I had with Bob Mann, a professor with inimitable tastes  (I was a guest on his late, lamented Sirius XM Radio show "Let's the Consider the Source" at least 50 times.  It should be coming back as a podcast soon.)

Maisel was everything Mann and the family said it was.  Hilarious and profound, and one of the best portrayals of Jewish life in 1950s New York City on any screen.   Further, Mrs. Maisel, mother of a baby girl and a young son whose husband Joel leaves her at the beginning of the story, provides a memorable tableau of late 50s Village cafe culture and extended media, as she tries to break into the stand-up comedy circuit.

She's enormously talented, and her riffing routines in themselves provide one of the real joys of this series.  Other highlights include

• a 2+ episode spot-on depiction of the Catskills in the summer, at least as good, and in some ways better, than what we saw in Dirty Dancing
• a portrayal by Luke Kirby (Rectify) of Lenny Bruce - who recognizes Maisel's talent, and does what he can to support her - that I actually liked better than Dustin Hoffman's in the 1974 Lenny, which, I don't know, was powerful, but too much Dustin
• and speaking of acting, Rachel Brosnahan (House of Cards) as Mrs. Maisel, Tony Shalhoub (Monk) as her father Abe Weissman, a professor of mathematics at Columbia University (though it looked like some of the exterior scenes were shot at Fordham), and Alex Borstein (never heard of her before) as Maisel's manager are just off-the-chart in their unique and fabulous performances.

But not everything has been perfect in this delightful, insightful series.

• Some of the details were anachronistic, i.e., incorrect for the time portrayed.  The Defenders debuted in 1961, and couldn't have been known to Maisel characters in 1959.   Same for Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," which was released in 1967.  Were the producers of Mrs. Maisel not allowed to look at IMDb and Wikipedia as part of their immersion in the time?
• The guy who played Steve Allen at the end of season 2 looked nothing like him.   Even Elvis Costello or someone I saw on Meet the Press would have been better.

But these are small quibbles for a series that has already taken its place along side of All in the Family and Curb Your Enthusiasm as laughing out loud, stoking your heart, and learning about life comedy.  And the second season was even better than the first - wilder and more clearly drawn story lines, always a good sign in a series.  Another triumph for risks and Amazon Prime Video.

Review of Rob Sheffield's Dreaming The Beatles 12 of X: Sgt. Pepper

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band likely figures in a lot more of Rob Sheffield's feast of Dreaming the Beatles - I'm up to page 171 of the 322-page book - but having just read three chapters on Pepper (about the Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane prelude, the album cover, and the actual recording and its place in history), this seemed like a good time to offer a few remarks.

First, I think I already may have mentioned in an earlier review that I wasn't thrilled with Sgt. Pepper the first time I  heard it -  I thought it went off the deep end and was no Rubber Soul or Revolver - but soon came to change my mind, and love it as indeed no Rubber Soul or Revolver, but in some ways even better.  I wrote a little essay about this in the 1980s entitled "Sgt. Pepper and the Presumption of Genius," the gist of which is when you encounter something that you don't especially like by geniuses whose earlier work you love, you should give the new work the presumption of genius and (in the case of music) listen to it some more, and maybe you'll discover that you were wrong the first and second or however many times.  (That essay was published in my Electronic Chronicles in 1992 - I keep saying I'll put up a Kindle edition in the next few months - I think that's a more likely true statement than it was before.)

Second, Sheffield acknowledges that the reason he does not hold Pepper in quite the same high regard as he does Rubber Soul and Revolver is because he heard the album for x number of years in "watered-down" stereo, not the mono in which it was originally released, and in which I of course first heard it when it was released in June 1967.  In fact, I never much cared for stereo, one reason why Ed Fox and I released our Twice Upon a Rhyme in 1972 in mono (the other reason is that we got all of our studio time free, but it wasn't that much time, and we only had enough time for a mono mix).

But the circumstances under which a creative work was first heard, and how those circumstances influence and even determine the listener's perception, is a crucial, often overlooked factor in popular culture.  In my previous review, I indicated how my hearing Revolver in its American release, with three great songs removed, short-changed my appreciation of the album.  And the "first-love syndrome" I also discussed in a previous review also figures into this process.

I'll conclude this reflection with a rare factual disagreement I have with Sheffield, who, contrasting Oscar Wilde and Lenny Bruce as Beatles inspirations or templates, says that unlike Wilde, Lenny Bruce produced no memorable lines that we still quote.  As evidence to the contrary, I'd offer Lenny Bruce's observation that "If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses".

Ok, back to life and music and I'll be back soon with another review.

See also Review of Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles 1 of X: The Love Affair ... 2 of X: The Heroine with a Thousand Faces ... 3 of X: Dear Beatles ... 4 of X: Paradox George ... 5 of X: The Power of Yeah ... 6 of X: The Case for Ringo ... 7 of X: Anatomy of a Ride ... 8 of X: Rubber Soul on July 4 ... 9 of X: Covers ... 10 of X: I. A. Richards ... 11 of X: Underrated Revolver  ...  13 of X: Beatles vs. Stones ... 14 of X: Unending 60s ... 15 of X: Voting for McCartney, Again ... 16 of X: "I'm A Loser" ... 17 of X: The Split ... 18 of X: "Absolute Elsewhere" ... 19 of X: (Unnecessary but Brilliant) Defense of McCartney ... 20 of X: "All Things Must Pass" ... 21 of X: Resistance ... 22: The 70s Till the End ... 23: Near the Science Fiction Shop ... 24 of 24: The Last Two

And here's "It's Real Life" -- free alternate history short story about The Beatles, made into a radio play and audiobook and winner of The Mary Shelley Award 2023

 
lots of Beatles in this time travel

Sell music on Amazon at ReverbNation.com