The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is a fun, beautifully acted and incredibly funny show about a woman who wants more from her life than wearing gorgeous coats and being the perfect wife and mother, and gets that “more” from becoming a successful standup comedian.
Midge Maisel is played by Rachel Brosnahan, who has won two Golden Globes, two Critics’ Choice Awards and an Emmy for the role, and is not a mother.
So, naturally, she’s being made to defend the parenting choices of her character, because apparently people have been really caught up in the whole 1950s thing while watching the show.
A random viewer responded to a tweet (from West Wing star Richard Schiff) praising the show with her own sniffy criticism: why bother making the character a mother if you’re not going to show her mothering?
https://twitter.com/froglette1969/status/1094085335355703296
Because apparently if you’re a mum, that’s the most interesting thing going on in your life, unless you’re a bad person. No exceptions.
Brosnahan’s co-star Alex Borstein, who was tagged, called out the comment, and then Brosnahan herself joined in.
Absolutely. I’m not sure I would go as far as terrible, however she’s certainly not winning “parent of the year”. But it also doesn’t change the fact that this was not one of the primary criticisms of Don Draper or Walter White who were similarly, single-mindedly ambitious. https://t.co/a1Q3GXCtyH
— Rachel Brosnahan (@RachelBros) February 10, 2019
She even pointed out that of course Midge is being a parent as well – off screen.
She definitely is. But her life as a mother is not the primary focus of our story. https://t.co/aQ2wdvKGem
— Rachel Brosnahan (@RachelBros) February 10, 2019
But honestly, are the standards to which we hold women still so backwards that we wig out when a fictional character on TV who happens to be a mother doesn’t spend half her screen time tending to scraped knees and dirty nappies?
Just because a woman on a TV show has kids, doesn’t mean that the show needs to show her doing parent stuff just to prove that she does it.
Midge Maisel is a well-off woman in 1950s New York – if she wasn’t chasing her dream playing 1am slots in crappy clubs, she’d probably be throwing parties and being in the audience at those clubs with her crappy husband like she was before, while a nanny looked after the kids.
And whether she was changing nappies or serving canapés, it’d be a much less interesting show if it had to spend time doing that it could spend showing her actually being funny.
As one of the responses to Brosnahan’s tweet pointed out, presumably she also has to pee at certain points in her day – doesn’t mean that it’s interesting or important enough to build a scene around.
I assume Midge also uses the bathroom… also not a focus of the story.?
— Steve Zimmerman (@steveazee) February 10, 2019
Forget whether women can have it all – apparently, even in 2019, even fictional women are open to criticism unless you show them doing it all.