Character
Miriam "Midge" Maisel
Miriam "Midge" Maisel in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017), played by Rachel Brosnahan.
Midge Maisel is a well-off Upper West Side housewife in 1958, funny and quick-tongued, who has arranged her life around being the perfect wife: hosting parties, keeping her figure, timing her husband's set at the comedy club. When that marriage collapses, she stumbles onstage drunk and discovers she has something the world hasn't asked her for.
Rachel Brosnahan plays Midge as someone whose politeness is a performance and whose real self is the wisecracking, filthy-mouthed voice underneath it, and the show lets that gap be the joke and the tragedy at once. Her rapid-fire delivery makes ambition look like a compulsion she's only just noticed she has.