The Making of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Infectiously Triumphant Finale

This post contains spoilers for Season 1 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

If you need a good pick-me-up, there’s hardly anything out there right now that’s better than The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Starring Rachel Brosnahan as the titular Jewish housewife-turned-comedian, the Amazon series is the ultimate breakup fantasy, about a mother of two who finds herself excelling at the very thing her husband always dreamed of doing—after he leaves her. As Midge Maisel, wife to Michael Zegen’s Joel, Brosnahan is as silver-tongued as she is luminous. She’s got a wise-cracking, tough-as-nails manager (and reluctant friend) by her side in Alex Borstein’s Susie, whom she once bribed with home cooking to get her husband a slot on stage. The debut season’s finale—in which Joel finds Midge performing an act that mocks their marital problems—is one of the year’s most satisfying TV moments. Eight episodes of emotional turmoil and occasionally incomprehensible unfairness culminate in one infectiously triumphant moment, in which Midge takes the stage and nails her stand-up act from start to finish—a “tight 10” so impeccable that even her dismayed estranged husband walks away repeating to himself, over and over, “She’s good.”

If the final scenes seem almost deliriously happy, there’s actually a reason for that: they were the very last moments shot on the show—at four in the morning.

“The last stand-up—the final moment of the final episode—we actually did shoot last,” Brosnahan told V.F. “It was the very last thing we shot in the season, at about four in the morning on our last day. It was bananas. We were so tired and kind of delirious, but maybe that was exactly right.”

“Most of the cast were there,” recalled Zegen. “It was the last night, so you don’t have to wake up early the next morning or anything. It was kind of like a party; they were bringing in tons of food and whatever. It was really fun.”

For Brosnahan, whom viewers might recognize from House of Cards, WGN’s Manhattan, or The Blacklist, her character’s defining moment actually comes one episode earlier, when Midge hones all of the jokes in her “tight 10”—a solid, 10-minute comedy set. To Brosnahan, that set “is a near-perfect blend of what she’s supposed to be, according to [her manager] Susie, and what she is.” The finale, in her mind, “is sort of a triumphant cherry on the season.”

Joel is the one who chooses to leave Midge in the show’s pilot—a mistake he immediately regrets, and spends the rest of the series trying to reverse. As Zegen put it, “People make mistakes. I’ve had girlfriends break up with me and then three days later, they call and tell me they miss me. That’s just life; it happens.” Still, he maintained that his character is a good guy; he’s just “young and stupid.”

But by the time we reach that final scene, Joel is having a particularly rough time. He’s quit his job because he never really loved it or understood his purpose there; he has no prospects; he’s estranged from his wife. “I don’t think he knows what he wants to do with his life,” Zegen said, “and I think it’s driving him crazy—and then to see the woman he loves performing stand-up, which was his dream, is completely emasculating all over again.” The moment is especially harsh coming after the traumatic moment in the pilot in which Joel tries to perform original material on the very same stage—and bombs.

To Brosnahan, that line Joel repeats at the end of the finale—”she’s good”—is crushing. “To me, it was that it’s Joel finally realizing that all of his fears have come true,” she said. “That she’s extraordinary, and he will never, ever be able to hold a candle. Even at the thing that he wanted to do the most, she’s just better. And that’s devastating—for anyone, surely, but particularly, I think, for a man at that time.”

For those who grew up watching Gilmore Girls, both Brosnahan and Zegen can confirm that working on Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—the latest collaboration between Gilmore creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband and frequent collaborator, Dan Palladino—was as rewarding as one would guess. Brosnahan noted that Amazon essentially gave Sherman-Palladino “free rein” to execute her vision, saying “‘yes’ to everything.”

“Amy and Dan, they love film; they love the art of filmmaking,” Brosnahan said. “And I think they have developed, as directors, a lot in the time between Gilmore Girls and our show. And some of the camera work and the way we shot things was thrilling.” For instance: they often shot “oners” by shooting entire six-page scenes without stopping. As Brosnahan described it, making Mrs. Maisel was “almost like we were shooting a mini-play a day with no rehearsal. And when it works, it’s magic . . . It’s unlike anything that I’ve ever done before, and I loved it, even when it was hard.”

But where, exactly, does this finale leave Midge and Joel? Is there any hope the two could reunite romantically? Should Midge even bother to give him another chance? Though Brosnahan is curious about the immediate aftermath of Joel finding out that Midge has been mining their lives for material, she also thinks the two have changed too much to get back together. And although the actress said she doesn’t know much about what’s coming up in the show’s already-announced second season—Zegen, too, said, “they never tell me anything”—she noted that Sherman-Palladino did tell her this: Midge and Joel “have that thing that you can’t describe—but they’re unable to get back on the same page. They’re going to be chasing that same page maybe forever.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen with them,” Brosnahan continued, “but they will always have to be a part of each other’s lives. They have children together. And I’m excited to see how that challenge unfolds for them.”

She’s also excited for the series to delve deeper into the relationship between Midge and Susie: “I love their friendship so much,” Brosnahan said. “I love their business partnership; I love their friendship. These are two women who would maybe never have met, and certainly would never be friends. And Midge is not someone who’s ever had a friendship like this before. This feels like it could be a deeper female friendship than anything she’s ever experienced or maybe thought was possible.”

“This sounds so cheesy, but they complete each other in a way,” Brosnahan continued. “Alex Borstein’s been calling it a romance, which I love. It feels so real. It’s this unusual romance at the center of this show, and I’m really looking forward to watching how they deal with each other moving forward.”

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Laura BradleyLaura Bradley is a Hollywood writer for VanityFair.com. She was formerly an editorial assistant at Slate and lives in Brooklyn.

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