Warning! SPOILERS ahead for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 4
Midge and Joel have two children in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel but so far the show's storylines have focussed almost entirely on Ethan, leaving Esther largely overlooked. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 4 was among Amazon Prime’s February releases—after an extended hiatus due to Covid—and returns with Midge and the gang entering the 1960s. As The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 5 has recently been announced as the series’ last, some are wondering if Midge’s daughter Esther will have any significant storylines before the show comes to an end.
Beginning in the late 1950s, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel follows Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), a contented wife and mother, living a charmed life on the Upper West Side. All is well until her husband, Joel, bombs in his hobby-career as a comedian and decides to end their marriage. Now a single mother, Midge takes to the stage herself and builds a substantial career as a stand-up comedian. Her success takes her on the road with mega-star Shy Baldwin in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 3, during which Joel steps in to take care of their two children while Midge is on tour. When Midge makes jokes about Shy on stage, however, she is fired from the tour and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 4 begins with Midge back in New York, trying to rebuild her career from a dingy strip club.
Throughout the show, the issue of supervision and care for Midge and Joel’s young children, Ethan and Esther, has been a background issue, with the children’s story mostly supplying material for co-parenting drama. Six-year-old Ethan, however, has been given far more story and screen time than his younger sister, the two-year-old Esther, and Ethan seems substantially favored by the family. While this may be, in part, explained by Esther’s young age, the oversight of her character may also be because The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is set in a time where boys were still, on a whole, favored in society.
The children’s storylines in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel speak volumes about the world at the time, with Midge and Joel arguing about Ethan’s schooling while Esther remains the punchline of a long-running joke about the size of her forehead. Season 4’s Coney Island trip for Ethan’s birthday saw the whole family journey to the iconic theme park (including the family maid, Zelda) and Esther is not only unaccounted for, but her absence goes completely unexplained. As The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is the story of one woman’s journey to independence and identity, it seems strange—and highly hypocritical—for the series to have abandoned Esther as nothing more than a punchline, unless Esther’s story is yet to come.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 4 is set in the 1960s, a decade that will bring great change for women. By the mid-1960s, women will see the first step toward equality in the workplace with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and the first wave of the Women’s Liberation Movement. And, though it is unclear how much time season 4 will cover and what years The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 5 will be set in, it seems safe to say that Esther’s story would be best tended to instead of ignored.
New episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel air Fridays on Amazon Prime.