Longing for a lost New York: place and televisual nostalgia in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Abstract

This essay contributes to work in media geography by bringing the geography of nostalgia into conversation with media nostalgia. Through an analysis of Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s text, intertextual discourses, location production, and tourism, I demonstrate how TV works to produce nostalgic attachments to places past, intervening materially into the present/future. Specifically, I argue Maisel harnesses affects of nostalgia to produce a discourse of a past New York as “authentic” and filled with creative potentiality in ways that respond to present-day anxieties around a lost, vanishing, and gentrifying New York. Whereas the larger body of scholarship in media studies neglects orientations of place in conceptualizing nostalgia in favor of its more popular associations with a longing for a past time, material objects, or home, Maisel points to how place is an important component of televisual nostalgia. Maisel’s production of an “authentic” New York of the past through its realist association with local specificity can be read, on the one hand, as an evacuation of the city’s histories of struggle through reclamation of an unproblematized past. On the other hand, however, Maisel also produces elements of nostalgic longing through a “yearning for authenticity” (Zukin, 2010) that can be used to mark the experience of change and the larger social forces at work in that change and open to other possibilities for the future city.