The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel comes back for its second season soon, despite the fact that I feel like they’ve been promoting it for an eternity. (They put all these decals on the bathroom mirrors at my Orangetheory, and that was over the summer.) I enjoy the show: It looks utterly fabulous, and Rachel Brosnahan is quite astonishing at creating and setting the pace of the patter, much as I remember being blown away by Lauren Graham. She’s really natural, even if the show does slide into Amy Sherman-Palladino’s tendency to cram an entire one-act play into each scene. But I’m into soothingly competent entertainment right now, and this definitely falls into that category. I highly recommend it. Even if you mute it and just look at the sets and the clothes, it’s feast.

The gang didn’t get great single red carpet-style shots at this, but in the group pic we can at least see that Rachel’s dress is really, really interesting. We’ve long suspected that she switched stylists, or at least had a Come to Midge moment with her team that has resulted in way more interesting stuff, and this lends credence to that. I don’t know why her skirt has giant combs on it, and actually it looks sort of like a giant repurposed blanket, but it fits and it’s colorful in an autumnal way; she looks happy and glorious. ASP has reined in her tutus a bit in favor of a pretty great red coat, Marin Hinkle and Tony Shalhoub have lovely suits on, and Michael Zegen looks nice but also kind of exhausted — as if he’s not at all sure what he’s supposed to do with the giant Empire State Building he’s holding, or has bad memories of one of these because his great-uncle was killed by on when someone flung it out a window, and Marin is trying to place a soothing hand on his arm so that he doesn’t monologue about it in the middle of this nice family photo. Maybe ASP can work that twist into season three.

[Photo: InstarImages.com]