The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel isn’t just about Midge Maisel’s journey to the top of the stand-up comedy world. It’s also about the relationships between parents and their children, who are going in entirely unexpected directions as adults. Tony Shalhoub and Kevin Pollack‘s on-screen children have careers neither of them could have imagined when the show began. Now heading into Season 4, things are only going to get more interesting, the two stars told PopCulture.com in a recent interview.
As Season 4 begins, Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) is bringing her family back together in their beloved Manhattan apartment, meaning that her parents Abe (Shalhoub) and Rose (Marin Hinkle), are living with her again. While Rose is still in shock over Midge’s career choice, Abe has come to terms with it. In fact, Abe’s new chosen profession as a Village Voice theater critic is going to bring the father and daughter closer together.
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“I definitely think they are, their lives are, are starting to converge slowly,” Shalhoub told PopCulture.com. “Certainly, we’re going to begin to see that in Season 4, where they’re both… especially after the crash and burn moment of Midge’s career at the end of Season 3, where she’s bounced off of the tour, Shy Baldwin’s tour. So now both Abe and Midge are kind of having to regroup and start over.”
Abe is also facing a “humbling” moment, Shalhoub said. Even though he’s happy to be writing reviews, it’s a very different line of work than a mathematics professor. “There’s almost a bit of a role reversal that that is in the offing, I think, where she is going to be starting to become the caretaker and the grownup, I guess you could say,” Shalhoub said since Midge is now the breadwinner in the family.
Meanwhile, Midge’s ex-husband Joel Maisel (Michael Zegen) is also going in a direction his parents Moishe (Pollack) and Shirley (Caroline Aaron) couldn’t have expected. In Season 3, Joel broke all ties to his father’s garment company and opened a nightclub in Chinatown. As Pollack pointed out though, Moishe has always wanted Joel to pursue his own dream. “I think the nightclub represents [Joel] pursuing his own ambition and dream, which is ultimately all Moishe wanted,” Pollack said.
The Season 4 premiere does have a big treat for audiences who love seeing the Maisels and Weissmans bicker. Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino crafted a scene where the two families argue on the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island. “We’re not really sure how we did it, frankly,” Shalhoub said. “It was kind of one of those miraculous things that our genius creators and cinematographer crew helped to make happen.”
Pollack is in an interesting position on the show since he came up through the showbusiness ranks as a comedian, but he doesn’t get to play one on a show about comedy! It’s “one of the bizarre twists of my so-called career,” Pollack joked before heaping praise on Luke Kirby’s “astonishing” work as Lenny Bruce and watching Rachel Brosnahan bloom as a stand-up comedian despite her background in drama. “Those monologues that Amy and [executive producer Daniel Palladino] wrote are so true, that I don’t really have a sense of why am I not doing that?” Pollack said. “It’s more of a sense of, well, they got this right.”
Mrs. Maisel Season 4 finally debuts on Amazon’s Prime Video on Feb. 18. Two episodes will be released each Friday during the season.
