The first three episodes of the final season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” debuted this week with a pair of unexpected exits: both Mei (Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu) and Lenny Bruce (Emmy winner Luke Kirby) departed from the narrative after playing key roles in the lives of Joel and Midge Maisel (Michael Zegen and Emmy winner Rachel Brosnahan) throughout the five-season run.
In the case of Mei, her pregnancy and potential marriage to Joel were dispatched when she decided to move to Chicago to follow her goal of becoming a doctor. While it’s not explicitly stated, it’s clear Mei had an abortion to terminate the pregnancy.
“It was a complete shock after reading the first episode,” Zegen told TVLine of the twist. “I thought maybe she was going to come back, but [Stephanie] told me she wasn’t. It was shocking… I expected them to be together forever, to be honest.”
But according to show co-creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, Mei was a character brought in to push “Joel off of his axis” and separate him from his ex-wife.
“We wanted to show Joel with a woman who was even more independent than Midge was. Midge embraced the Betty Crocker myth; Mei did not. So [her] pregnancy [teed up] an inevitable conclusion [for the character],” co-creator Daniel Palladino added to TVLine.
While it’s tempting to assume Hsu was written off the show due to scheduling conflicts with the awards run for “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” Sherman-Palladino said the decision happened well before the star’s film breakout.
“You don’t ask Stephanie to show up and not give her anything to do,” she said to TVLine. “If she’s gonna show up, you gotta give her great stuff to do. She’s not going to sit there for two or three episodes and be window-dressing just because we’re greedy and we love Stephanie.”
As for Kirby and his character, fans might have been surprised to see Lenny fly off to California in the Season 5 premiere – particularly after the events of the Season 4 finale, when he and Midge finally consummated their relationship and Lenny also urged Midge to take her career to the next level. But Lenny’s arc is set by actual history: the comedian faced mounting legal issues in his final years before his death in 1966. For that reason, the decision was made to give Lenny one last moment with Midge – a brief and loaded goodbye at the airport before his flight west.
“We were in 1961. He was about to hit his downward spiral,” Sherman-Palladino told Entertainment Weekly. “We talked a lot about what more did we need from the character? That moment on the stage of Carnegie Hall, everything between her and Lenny has been leading to that moment, not the moment where they sleep together.”
If the moment in the Season 5 premiere feels final, that’s because Kirby played it as such. “I didn’t know where the season was going to go,” he said to Entertainment Weekly. “But I definitely played it differently than any other time that we’ve said goodbye to each other. Something about that red hall [in the TWA terminal at the airport] gave me an instinct that this was a little different from our prior encounters.”
Season 5 of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” streams weekly on Amazon through the end of May.
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