The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ends; creator kinda-sorta blames The Rings of Power

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has arguably been the crown jewel in the Amazon Prime Video library ever since it debuted on 2017. A zippy period comedy and a housewife who becomes a comedian in the 1950s and 60s, the show hoovered up awards, developed a devoted following, and in general was just really good.

And last week, it ended. The series finale dropped on Friday to typically great acclaim, wrapping up the fifth and final season. If creator Amy Sherman-Palladino had her way, the show would have gone on for longer — after all, her beloved series The Gilmore Girls lasted for seven seasons — but it wasn’t in the cards for Mrs. Maisel, and Sherman-Palladino thinks she knows why.

“It wasn’t me,” Sherman-Palladino said on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast. “But things come to an end. I understand. But you know, there’s orcs to pay for. There’s a lot of orcs running around. They gotta pay the orcs.”

"Maisel was a very expensive show by the end. All those bells and whistles. Doing period shows are very expensive. It’s not just—it’s not just the cars and the dresses and the sets. It’s all the work afterwards, taking out all the modern stuff. The special effects are special. You wouldn’t think we were special effects when we got no dragons. We looked at the fifth season and like–’okay, let’s land the plane.’ Because halfway through the season, people started saying: ‘well, I mean, what about a reboot?’ I’m like, ‘oh, my god, just let me land the plane.’ Let me make sure that if people liked the show, and if people watched the show, at the end, they feel like their journey was closed. That was very important to me."

Amazon cancels rash of shows

Amazon famously spent a historically huge amount of money on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a new series set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a land infested with orcs. Sherman-Palladino is being light here, but she seems to be implying that Mrs. Maisel came to a premature end because there wasn’t enough money left over after Amazon spent much of it on The Rings of Power.

Amazon in particular has cancelled a lot of series lately, including A League of the Their Own, Hunters, Paper Girls and Carnival Row. Some of those are pretty expensive, but none so much as mega-series like Citadel and The Rings of Power. You have to wonder how many smaller series we’ll get from Amazon going forward.

On the other hand, five seasons isn’t a small amount, so The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel had a respectable run.

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h/t MovieWeb