The viewer is immersed into that time period and is transported to New York delicatessens, seedy bars, and fancy clubs. We become intimate with the wealthy Jewish family life of the Maisels in their luxurious Upper West Side apartment. We experience their neuroses that create (or are created by) the social rules that govern their lives.
I feel some nostalgia here since I was born in 1953 and remember much of what I'm seeing in this show. As a kid I flipped through the LIFE magazines and Saturday Evening Posts lying around, I saw the ads in the newspaper and perused my parents' record collection, listening to albums of Broadway musicals, Bob Newhart's "Button Down Mind," and Harry Belafonte live at Carnegie Hall. I experience this same culture with Mrs. Maisel and It's a delightful romp into the past.
That is, until I hear it: Anachronistic dialogue.
Liberally peppered throughout the show are phrases that sound more twenty-first century than mid-century modern. "blow your mind" and "bumming me out," phrases used in the show, came much later during the hippie era of the mid-to-late sixties. "Touching base," "micro-managing," and being "on the same page" are phrases born of modern day business, not of the secretary-stenographer-telephone operator world of 1958 business. When Midge is confused about a concept, she asks, "Is that a thing?" It's freaking me out! ("freaking me out," by the way, was a phrase actually uttered by one of the characters on the show.)
I'm apparently not alone in my dismay. A quick online search shows that other viewers are bugged by the out-of-time dialogue, too, and they bring up many other examples. This show has won eight Emmys so far, leading me to believe that they're doing something right. So, why do the writers stumble into these boulders of phrases and words? One theory I read online was that perhaps adding modern phrasing would make the characters more relatable. An interesting thought. Maybe if the dialogue was strictly kosher with regards to 1958 speech, it would sound foreign to younger viewers. Maybe it would place the characters into a distant place and time, ruining our immersion into the richness of the period, along with our attachment to it. Maybe. Perhaps it's just laziness. To me, the sets are just about right, though, with the posters on the walls, advertisements in stores, the cars--all that looks good to me. But in the blogs and forums relating to the dialogue glitches, some contributors also mention set errors that include wrong bumper styles for the period on the Checker Cabs, and a wrong time slot for Howdy Doody. Okay, that degree of criticism may be taking it too far, at least for me. It's probably pretty hard getting it all right. Maybe the writers are all much younger than me, and maybe they are just having too much fun doing this. I can accept that, so I'm going to cool it and enjoy the show.
But there is another thought that came to my mind, and that is:
What if Mrs. Maisel is a time traveler who somehow popped through a portal from 2019 and into 1958?
An exciting concept, and I'd watch that, too!