4x03 Everything is Bellmore

[9.2/10] It’s a cliche, but it’s tough to remember an hour of television that made me both tear up and laugh this hard. It’s a testament to the incredible balancing act of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a show that can tickle your funny bone and win you over with whimsy and style at every turn, only to stop and break your heart when it feels like it. It takes a set of experts behind the scenes and talented performers at the top of their game to make it work, but god help me, this show pulls it off.

I love the story of Susie mourning Jackie. I’ll confess, I didn’t know the actor who played Jackie had passed away, which only added to the poingnance of the moment. But so much of the story so perfectly walks the line between funny and sad. There’s a surprising amount of laughs for such a grim thing! Susie’s catatonia over the whole thing to where Midge moves her around like a little doll. Susie going to the theater and just so happening to see all the plays with death in the title. Rose explaining that a man died in Susie’s apartment so she can’t go back, only for her friend to ask whether his body was blocking the door. It’s black comedy, but it works like gangbusters.

So does the well-observed situation where Susie lived with Jackie, slept next to him, spent any number of hours with him, but realizes she still didn’t truly know him. There’s depths to our friends and acquaintances we may never know, parts of their lives they share and parts that stay hidden. Death removes that chance from our grasp. Finding so much about Jackie’s life Susie had no idea about shakes her. She not only misses her friend; she misses all the things she missed about him while he was alive. There’s poignance and truth in that, in ways that are both comical and piercing.

Those adjectives apply just as well to her speech. It rivals BoJack Horseman for the most eccentric but no less moving funeral speech. There’s something so true and heartbreaking about what Susie says here. We don’t always know what we mean to people. Some folks who we know live lives of distinction with no renown. They deserve to be remembered, to be recognized, to be appreciated in life and in death. Susie’s heartbreak at the double loss of the man she knew and the man she didn’t, and her resolve to lift up those like him in his honor, is one of the best moments in the whole show.

What’s so impressive about this episode is that the same goes for another, very different scene. Holy hell, Abe getting reamed out by the entire congregation for his brutal review of a play written by the temple’s favorite son in the middle of a bar mitzvah is uproarious. The dirty looks, Abe’s spirited defense of himself as a truth-teller, Moishe’s confusion turned to resentment over him having an aliyah, the culmination of the running gag about Midge doing a terrible job in the 1953 Catskills production of the same show, Rose’s shocked reveal that the character she loves to hate is based on her, a rousing talmudic debate over what implement Cain used to kill Abel, Joel preemptively not hitting on another guy’s wife, random shouts from the peanut gallery. It’s all just a glorious symphony of absurd humor mixed with the sort of circle the wagons defense of their own that you find in tight-knit communities. It’s another masterpiece scene, every bit the equal of the Ferris Wheel in the opening.

Hell, there’s a lot of those multi-man royal rumble comedy sequences in this one. The Maisels and Weissmans sitting down to dinner and going back and forth over squash, theater tickets, matchmaking, and Susie is a hoot in the spirit of Gilmore Girls’ famed Friday night dinners. The scene in the theater itself, with jabs at Midge’s singing, Shirley chasing after a celebrity, and Abe reveling in his cape is a delight. The ten-car pile-up of comic characters and great lines is this one is just outstanding.

It’s a good Midge episode too, though! We see her hacking it at the burlesque club where she’s wrangled a job as emcee. Her treating a solid but comparatively low rent gig like it’s one spit-shine away from being a well-oiled machine is a good laugh in and of itself. Seeing her flit around trying to make improvements and introduce herself like she’s a counselor at Steiner’s is a nice tribute to a certain out of touch-ness with her setting.

But then we get our first Lenny Bruce appearance of the season! It’s great to receive the first dose of the duo’s stellar dynamic for the first time in quite a while. His likely apocryphal speech about being pelted with erasers while giving a school presentation as a lesson on staying cool despite distractions, and vowing to return the favor for Midge during her set, is a stellar setup. True to form, it brings the best out of Midge, who ad-libs to making fun of a few oblivious patrons while being hit with crumpled up paper and straws throughout her set. It’s a nice bit of ribbing and minor victory for Midge in an episode that isn’t about her as much as many installments of this one are.

Instead it’s about Abe, who has a great scene with his editor about using his voice, little realizing his self importance will not only threaten his wife’s budding business but potentially implicate him and his friend to the FBI. It’s about Rose, who’s succeeding in the matchmaking biz and has a hilarious scene where she has to babysit Susie as though the grown woman is a toddler.

And it’s especially about Susie, a woman not prone to emotion who is nevertheless rattled by the death of her friend, and has to lean on Midge and the Weissmans and the other small bits of support in her life to get by. It is unreasonably funny, and just as heartbreaking in turn. Not every show can succeed at both so well, but The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel can.