3x01 Strike Up the Band

[7.4/10] Ahhhh, the inevitable double-edged sword that is the writing of Amy Sherman-Palladino. She is a master of dialogue. She’s fantastic at constructing scenes. And she’s brilliant at writing individual episodes. But she is much more hit or miss when it comes to building a season of television and the sort of long-term storytelling incumbent with doing so.

Case-in-point, this season premiere just “yadda yadda yaddas” its way over some pretty big stuff from the finale. For one thing, we don’t get so much as conversation with Benjamin. He’s just gone, and the show and Midge have moved on. Ooooookaaaaay. Abe has apparently gone ahead and quit Columbia (or might? or is in the process of doing so? The show isn’t terribly clear on it). Joel took Midge’s “just one night” thing to heart, and they’re not going to deal with it outside of one brief passive aggressive phone call (not that I’m really complaining or asking for more of that).

It’s frustrating, because so much of the individual material here is good. Everything at the USO show is a blast! The family fight at the Weisman house is both charged and funny. Susie on the phone with Sophie Lennon and then breaking it to Midge is great. It’s just when you pull back and look at the show as a whole and the way it elides certain things to get to more enjoyable shtick that you start to feel a little dissatisfied with the forest relative to the trees.

But at least the trees are good. Midge’s set about the army rightfully kills! The funny situational humor about her forgetting to introduce Shy Baldwin (replete with a great “We’re gonna work on that” from him) and mumbling her way through “White Christmas” are a hoot. Susie looking for comparisons for what to ask for in terms of a contract, getting recruited by the army, and playing cards with the grunts got laughs out of me. The military stiffs mixing with showbiz results in plenty of chuckles; the performances are great, and there’s a really fun energy to the whole thing. It’s sort of zip and zinger-filled set piece that Sherman-Palladino does so well.

And yet, at the same time, we’re still doing stories with Joel. Why? Why am I expected to still care about Joel at this point. We’ve hypercharged his “maybe I’ll buy a club” storyline (another thing blown by between seasons), and he’s purchased a fixer-upper in Chinatown with his dad’s gift. Unbeknownst to him, there’s a Chinese gambling ring taking place in the back room, and he meets a young woman running it (or at least involved) who has Sherman-Palladino’s whip-smart quips and seems poised to have some Hepburn-Tracy chemistry with Joel as he hashes out this club thing. At least it’s not more material with him and Midge, I suppose?

Then there’s the Weissmans hashing it out. I love the reveal that Rose has been funding their extravagant lifestyle out of her trust fund all this time. It’s a nice backstop to Abe’s “it’s my career, and I can do what I want with it” position. It’s all well and good to want to rediscover your rabble-rousing roots, but it’s another thing to blow up your family’s life over it without consulting them, let alone considering their point of view. (Though honestly, maybe they should just go back to Paris?)

The recriminations thrown around have weight, and despite his myopia about it, there’s something human and relatable about Abe’s “I meant to be an agitator, how did I end up as a guy in a big house wearing two sweaters” crisis, the sort many folks go through when they realize their life has departed from their youthful ideas for one reason or another. But again, I like that he gets pushback on it, from Rose who refuses to take the blame for his gripes and forces him to think practically, and from Midge who tells him that if he was so interested in free speech he would champion the comics testing its limits rather than demean her profession. (He’s particularly harsh with his “you’re a quitter” line of argument.)

But he’s at least willing to test unfamiliar waters and so goes to see Lenny Bruce. In a trenchant act about the hypocrisy of how American society tolerates untold violence in its media but flinches at anything sexual, Bruce arouses the ire of the authorities. That prompts Abe to put the old chestnut of “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” into practice. Maybe it’s just Midge’s challenge, but him standing up for Lenny is a nice moment, even if his ending up in jail with him a la Midge in the first episode is a little too cute by half. I suppose it’s supposed to parallel another awakening in the Weisman family, but surely something in this family can happen without the involvement of Lenny Bruce.

That just leaves Susie’s business dealings with Sophie Lennon. Two things off the bat. For one, the comic mileage the show gets out of Jackie subletting Susie’s crappy apartment is incredible. For another, Jane Lynch is a national treasure, and the whole superior, insistent affect she assumes as Sophie Lennon is incredible. Her conversation with Susie over the phone, replete with Jackie as a greek chorus, is another one of those trademark Sherman-Palladino bits of repartee.

But it also prompts a good wedge between Midge and Susie. Susie takes the opportunity, because she has to, because it’s a big deal, and if she’s going to make something of herself as a manager, she can’t just manage one client. But Midge is, not without reason, upset that her manager is also going to represent someone who tried to have Midge blackballed. You understand both sides of it, and it makes for a legitimate stumbling block the two characters will have to resolve in the future.

I just hope the show actually takes the time to have them do so. There's so many great characters and potential for conflict here. I want the show to dig into those things, to set them against one another and deal with the fallout, rather than take these big stories in strange directions and skip over the consequences. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is still a delight from moment-to-moment, but those moments, unfortunately, don’t always add up to a complete whole.