The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 4 opened with the memorable episode “Rumble on the Wonder Wheel,” and it was quite the creative task to capture and film the iconic Coney Island attraction. The period comedy-drama is set in the 1950s and 1960s and stars Rachel Brosnahan as the titular Miriam “Midge” Maisel. The series premiered on Amazon Prime Video in 2017 and has received much critical acclaim since then, including Golden Globes and Emmys for the show overall and several members of its star-studded cast. Season 4 premiered in February 2022, and the fifth and final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was ordered then as well.
The first episode of season 4 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel sees Midge returning home from her failed comedy tour. She has to break the news to her family, including her father Abe (Tony Shalhoub), her mother Rose (Marin Hinkle), her estranged husband Joel (Michael Zegen), and his parents Moishe (Kevin Pollak) and Shirley (Caroline Aaron). It all comes out during a ride on Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel, with the characters yelling at each other as they express their shock and disappointment at Midge’s secret.
Filming this Coney Island scene in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was no small feat, and it took many people to figure it out, according to Vanity Fair. When series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino wrote the scene, Coney Island was shut down due to the pandemic, so it was a unique opportunity to film there without worrying about interrupting the park’s operation. They used the real Wonder Wheel for some shots, but they also recreated its carriages on a soundstage in front of a green screen. Visual effects supervisor Lesley Robson-Foster built a miniature model of the wheel to keep everything clear, like which characters were across from each other, where they were on the wheel at any given time, if they were going up or down, and so on. Cinematographer M. David Mullen rode the wheel with Robson-Foster to research how the characters’ positions on the wheel determined which sights and ambient sounds should be most prevalent: the gulls and ocean or the Coney Island crowds. During filming, the cast stood off-camera and yelled their dialogue at the people sitting in the created Wonder Wheel carriage. Read Tony Shalhoub’s description of filming the scene below:
“It was layered absurdity, if you will. It was sort of like, there’s the absurdity of the scene itself, and then there’s the absurdity of us all pretending that you’re going up and down and swinging in this little thing, and then having lines, having dialogue shot at you and trying to find the person you’re talking to at any given second. So there was a lot of cracking up. It just felt completely absurd.”
The creative team did take some artistic liberties. The fact that the characters can hear each other yelling on the ride at all is just for the show; they wouldn’t be able to talk on the real attraction since it is too big and loud. The show omitted the Wonder Wheel carriages that rock and roll back and forth because they would have impeded hearing the dialogue even more. They also played with the Wonder Wheel’s colors, using more pastels to fit the established aesthetic of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
All this work—the models, research, and yelling—is paid off with a fun, memorable scene in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The fact that the team behind the series is willing to put so much work into one scene is a testament to their love of the craft and the show, so it is exciting to anticipate what they will do with season 5 and its Gilmore Girls cameos. Despite their creative liberties, they tried to make it as realistic as possible, and the result is an unforgettable sequence with just the right mix of hilarity and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel‘s 1950s “stardust.”
