Mrs. Maisel Yet Again — 1961 Talking Like It’s 2011.

April 18, 2023
Posted by Jay Livingston

Five years ago, I posted here about the language anachronisms in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” That post (here) remains the most visited page in this blog, the number of views now approaching 20,000. Last night I watched the first two episodes of Season Five, and I have the same question that I had five years ago with Season One: How can they let these obvious anachronisms make it into the final script?

In Season Five, the year is 1961, and Midge has taken a job in the writers’ room for a TV show much like The Tonight Show. She was reluctant to take the job – she’s a performer, not a writer — and on her first day, she calls her manager Susie to ask for advice.

Fake it till you make it may be good advice, but nobody used that phrase in 1961. Nobody. Nor did anyone talk about “going rogue.” But in Episode One, Midge tells Susie, “We had a plan, then I went rogue.”

I ran these phrases by Google nGrams. Here are the results:

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

These phrases did not exist in 1961. Yes,the nGrams data is from books, and trendy phrases turn up in speech — in conversations, on television — before they appear in print, so we should allow for some lag time. A few years perhaps, but not a few decades.

There were others you can find on nGrams: out of the loop, track record, not on the same page. These too arrived much later in the century. Other words in Season Five just sounded wrong --- at least to my ears, and my ears were around in 1961 —  but I had no quick way to check them: not gonna happen, and suck meaning to be of poor quality.

In that 2018 post, I quoted Amy Sherman-Palladino, co-creator and chief writer of the show saying that she hired a “delightful researcher who has like twelve masters degrees in everything in the world” and who questions things that don’t sound right. Sherman-Palladino herself says, “The last thing I want to do, when everyone is making sure that the piping on the wall and the colors are all correct, is . . . come in and throw in a bunch of dialogue that’s not appropriate.”

But the glaring anachronisms remain, and I’m still puzzled.