We finished binge-watching Seasons 1  and 2 of Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  Eighteen hours over five days, a large part of that on last Sunday.  We know that's nowhere near marathon compared to some binge-watch horror stories we've heard about, and we've probably spent more hours on video games over shorter spans of time in the past, but it's sort of a first for us.

We'll say this about the show - it was entertaining and diverting, and Season 1 was much better than Season 2.  The show is set in 1957 and is about a wealthy, Upper West Side young Jewish housewife, Midge Maisel, who unexpectedly discovers she has a talent for stand-up comedy as her "normal" domestic life falls into a tailspin.  No spoiler alerts are needed but in the more-satisfying Season 1, she gives a few spontaneous stand-up performances in various downtown dives, and the season traces her progress from a cliche Jewish princess to a trail-blazing comedian.  In the course of Season 1, she gets bailed out of jail (for profanity) by no less than Lenny Bruce, finds herself outside a nightclub smoking reefers with jazz musicians, meets her first drag queens, and finds herself becoming the darling of the downtown bohemian crowd. It's all very light-hearted and fun, and the script lets the lead actor, Rachel Brosnahan, get off a lot of good jokes and wise-cracks.  Her style is a cross somewhere between Lanny Bruce and Dorothy Parker, with a touch of Jerry Seinfeld thrown into the mix.

After the eight-episode Season 1, the 10 episodes of Season 2 felt like a let down.  After a couple episodes unnecessarily set in Paris for some reason, the eponymous Mrs. Maisel and her parents head upstate to a Catskills resort for their annual summer vacation.  The Catskill episodes felt campy and unrealistic as Midge and her parents unquestioningly relish in cornball activities like singalongs and group calisthenics and beauty contests for married women.  There's no trace of Midge's otherwise cynical rebelliousness nor of her parents' former world-weary aloofness, and suddenly, they're all about tomato juice and boating.  The writers would have us believe that these activities are their cherished rituals and routines from years and years of going to the Catskills, but her father, an intellectually bullying Columbia  University professor well played by Tony Shalhoub, would never otherwise follow a crowd so unquestioningly, and Midge shows no sign of any residual adolescent rebellion against the bourgeois activities.  One would think her year of doing stand-up in downtown hipster clubs and smoking joints outside of the stage door with the hepcat musicians would have changed her, but instead she acts like just another mindless sheep up in the Catskills, and shows no regrets about simply walking out on her fledgling comedy career just as it was starting to really take off.  The disturbing thing is that it seems as if the writers are saying, "Look, going to the Catskills - this is what Jews do, isn't it funny?" and there's something disturbingly anti-semitic about that.

Worse, it seemed like the Catskills episodes would never end.  When Midge is finally convinced by her manager to return to the city for a gig after one whole episode of the Catskills shenanigans, you'd think that storyline had finally run its course, but she's right back up in there in the Catskills again later in the next episode, and even shows up again in a third episode.  What could have otherwise been merely a single off-kilter episode, one dischordent strike of the wrong keyboard note, starts to feel like some sort of whirlpool from which the writers and actors couldn't escape, as scene after scene in episode after episode continues the "Look, she left her career to spend the summer up in the Catskills" story line.  

Season 2 eventually - slowly, painfully - managed to finally get past the Catskills, but just as it was starting to regain its footing once again, instead of doing what was so good about Season 1 - namely, exploring the strange counter-culture world of the 1958 downtown beatnik and stand-up scene - it took another left-hand turn and devolved into a romcom, with Midge pulled between an impossibly too-perfect Jewish surgeon and her former husband.  Granted, a little romance would not have been out of place as a subplot to the story of Mrs. Maisel's climb to fame, but instead it became the main theme and the very thing that differentiated the series from any of the other sitcoms or soap operas on TV instead became a back story. 

Overall though, despite the Catskills and the late-season schmaltz, we enjoyed the series.  We would recommend watching Season 1, and it's probably safe to skip over Episodes 4, 5 and 6 of Season 2 (you'll quickly catch up on the few plot developments that did occur up in the Catskills).  The end of the season is like drinking cheap champagne, a little too sweet and ultimately disappointing, but not anything you won't get over.           

Amazon has announced that Season 3 of Mrs. Maisel will air in December 2019, and all other things being equal, we'll be watching when it does.