Jonathan Burack

I thought Season 1 had potential. As of Season 2, episode 3 (for me so far) it seems almost certainly on the road to blowing that potential totally. The show could have taken an ironic swipe at our own era of increasingly oppressive p.c. conformity by using the Maisel-Lenny Bruce theme to show what it took then to overcome such oppressive conformity and hinting at the need now for a new kind of iconoclasm to explode the suffocating new forms of conformity we face. That would mean exactly NOT becoming a present-day feminist harridan, but someone who shows that true female power does not reside in that direction. But frankly Midge's "F-word" laden crudity in episode 3 seems to be taking the show in exactly the other direction. (Midge even uses the term "F-word," only one of many anachronisms that are getting increasingly jarring.) Bruce pushed the envelope of his day with his crudity. To the degree that his style BECAME the envelope of our day. The new conformity. Conformity takes many forms and ironic twists in culture. At this point I despair of seeing anything like any insight about this. Too bad, because the potential was there. Perhaps it is still. I will watch the rest of Season 2, but that's going to be it.