The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, the Amazon-streaming series that's in its first season, just won big time at the 70th annual Emmy Awards on Monday night at the Microsoft Centre in Los Angeles, USA.
Winning five trophies for Best Comedy series as well as for best actress (Rachel Brosnahan), best supporting actor (Alex Borstein), best director and best script-writer (Amy Sherman-Pelladino) of a comedy, Mrs Maisel may not have been viewed by too many Kenyans as yet. But it's got a great story and has special relevance to young Kenyan women.
For while the story is set in the 1950s New York City, it's about a newly-married woman in her 20s named Miriam 'Midge' Maisel.
She's happy to be in a conventional middle class marriage where, despite having gone to one of the best women's universities in the States, she's thoroughly content to be a housewife whose whole life is focused on her man.
His ambition is to be a stand-up comic and she does everything in her power to support him, but when he realises he'll never be a comedian, he reveals he's been having an affair with his secretary and he leaves Midge for her.
Midge is furious as he's just smashed her dreams as well, but inadvertently, she takes the stand-up stage that he failed to command. That 'inadvertent' (and bumpy) path to finding her way into a professional career is what the series charts.
FINDING HER VOICE
During her acceptance speech, Rachel explained that the story "is all about a woman who's finding her voice anew. It's one of the things that's happening right now all over the country, and all over the world."
Rachel is no stranger to cable TV series. She was in House of Cards for 13 episodes, played Abby Isaac in Manhattan, was in movies like The Unborn (while still in high school) and in network TV shows like Gossip Girl, The Good Wife and Grey's Anatomy (while still at New York University's Tisch School of Arts).
She' even been on Broadway, making her debut in 2013 after which she starred as Desdemona in Othello opposite David Oyelowo (who played Dr Martin Luther King, Jr in Selma) and Daniel (007) Craig.
